was the civil war necessary essay

Was the Civil War necessary? A thought 150 years later

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Was the Civil War unnecessary? Contributor Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute asks this in a column posted on Sept. 19 at Forbes.com . Sept. 19 was a couple of days after the 151 th anniversary of the bloodiest battle in U.S. history, at Antietam.

Bandow quotes North Carolina historian David Goldfield, who writes in “America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation” that slavery existed in a number of nations, but all of them except the United States and Haiti ended it peacefully. Part of the reason, he writes, is that people in those countries didn’t moralize the question as much as the Americans, who had just gone through a religious revival. Other countries treated it more as a practical problem to be solved.

I recently read a book that made the same point: Thomas Fleming’s “A Disease of the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War.” Fleming argues that each side had a “disease of the mind” that made it unnecessarily intransigent. For the South, the “disease” was fear of a race war, and belief that that’s what the Northern abolitionists really wanted. For the North the “disease” was the thinking of the abolitionists, who cultivated hatred of “the Slave Power” and willingness to fight it to the death.

Fleming’s argument is that there was a peaceful way out: that slaveowners could be compensated and the slaves released. That was the way it was done in some of the Caribbean colonies, apparently. You can argue that that way was wrong, because slave owners didn’t deserve any payment, it was the slaves who deserved payment, and morally you’d make a lot of sense. But paying the slaveowners, he argues, could have prevented 600,000 people from dying in the war.

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It’s a thing to think about. We tend to present the Civil War as a simple contest between right and wrong, and we put ourselves on the side of right. And I believe that if they were going to have a fight, it was best that the Union won. Still—did they have to have a fight?

I have my own bit to add to this. I have been reading Civil War newspapers from Washington Territory as part of a project for the Museum of History and Industry. The Civil War wasn’t fought here, but the political arguments were made here between Republicans and Democrats of various stripes (mostly not secessionists) and you can get a feeling for both sides. And the feeling I get is that the Republican side —Lincoln’s side — was the more shrill.

I recall reading one newspaper editor at war’s end calling for Jeff Davis, Robert  E. Lee and all high Confederate army officers to be hanged. The pro-Lincoln side was loose with the words, “treason” and “traitor.”Lincoln wanted to be magnanimous toward the South, but many on his side didn’t. The Democrat papers here were more openly racist, in an off-hand, totally not-worried way that is a bit shocking to modern sensibilities, but I didn’t catch them talking about stringing people up.

10 Facts: What Everyone Should Know About the Civil War

Fact #1: The Civil War was fought between the Northern and the Southern states from 1861-1865.

The American Civil War was fought between the United States of America and the Confederate States of America, a collection of eleven southern states that left the Union in 1860 and 1861. The conflict began primarily as a result of the long-standing disagreement over the institution of slavery. On February 9, 1861,   Jefferson Davis , a former U.S. Senator and Secretary of War, was elected President of the Confederate States of America by the members of the Confederate constitutional convention.  After four bloody years of conflict, the United States defeated the Confederate States. In the end, the states that were in rebellion were readmitted to the United States, and the institution of slavery was abolished nation-wide.

Fact #2: Abraham Lincoln was the President of the United States during the Civil War.

Abraham Lincoln grew up in a log cabin in Kentucky.  He worked as a shopkeeper and a lawyer before entering politics in the 1840s.  Alarmed by his anti-slavery stance, seven southern states seceded soon after he was elected president in 1860—with four more states to soon follow.  Lincoln declared that he would do everything necessary to keep the United States united as one country. He refused to recognize the southern states as an independent nation and the Civil War erupted in the spring of 1861.  On January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation , which freed the slaves in the areas of the country that "shall then be in rebellion against the United States." The Emancipation Proclamation laid the groundwork for the eventual freedom of slaves across the country.  Lincoln won re-election in 1864 against opponents who wanted to sign a peace treaty with the southern states.  On April 14, 1865, Lincoln was shot by assassin John Wilkes Booth, a southern sympathizer. Abraham Lincoln died at 7:22 am the next morning. 

Fact #3: The issues of slavery and central power divided the United States.

Slavery was concentrated mainly in the southern states by the mid-19th century, where slaves were used as farm laborers, artisans, and house servants. Chattel slavery formed the backbone of the largely agrarian southern economy.  In the northern states, industry largely drove the economy. Many people in the north and the south believed that slavery was immoral and wrong, yet the institution remained, which created a large chasm on the political and social landscape. Southerners felt threatened by the pressure of northern politicians and “abolitionists,” who included the zealot John Brown , and claimed that the federal government had no power to end slavery, impose certain taxes, force infrastructure improvements, or influence western expansion against the wishes of the state governments. While some northerners felt that southern politicians wielded too much power in the House and the Senate and that they would never be appeased. Still, from the earliest days of the United States through the antebellum years, politicians on both sides of the major issues attempted to find a compromise that would avoid the splitting of the country, and ultimately avert a war. The Missouri Compromise , the Compromise of 1850 , the Kansas-Nebraska Act , and many others, all failed to steer the country away from secession and war. In the end, politicians on both sides of the aisle dug in their heels. Eleven states left the United States in the following order and formed the Confederate States of America: South Carolina , Mississippi , Florida, Alabama, Georgia , Louisiana, Texas , Virginia , Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee.

Fact #4: The Civil War began when Southern troops bombarded Fort Sumter, South Carolina.

When the southern states seceded from the Union, war was still not a certainty. Federal forts, barracks, and naval shipyards dotted the southern landscape. Many Regular Army officers clung tenaciously to their posts, rather than surrender their facilities to the growing southern military presence. President Lincoln attempted to resupply these garrisons with food and provisions by sea. The Confederacy learned of Lincoln’s plans and demanded that the forts surrender under threat of force.  When the U.S. soldiers refused, South Carolinians bombarded  Fort Sumter in the center of Charleston harbor.  After a 34-hour battle, the soldiers inside the fort surrendered to the Confederates.  Legions of men from north and south rushed to their respective flags in the ensuing patriotic fervor. 

Fact #5: The North had more men and war materials than the South.

At the beginning of the Civil War, 22 million people lived in the North and 9 million people (nearly 4 million of whom were slaves) lived in the South.  The North also had more money, more factories, more horses, more railroads, and more farmland. On paper, these advantages made the United States much more powerful than the Confederate States.  However, the Confederates were fighting defensively on territory that they knew well. They also had the advantage of the sheer size of the Southern Confederacy. Which meant that the northern armies would have to capture and hold vast quantities of land across the south. Still, too, the Confederacy maintained some of the best ports in North America—including New Orleans, Charleston, Mobile, Norfolk, and Wilmington. Thus, the Confederacy was able to mount a stubborn resistance.

Fact #6: The bloodiest battle of the Civil War was the Battle of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

The Civil War devastated the Confederate states.  The presence of vast armies throughout the countryside meant that livestock, crops, and other staples were consumed very quickly.  In an effort to gather fresh supplies and relieve the pressure on the Confederate garrison at Vicksburg, Mississippi, Confederate General Robert E. Lee launched a daring invasion of the North in the summer of 1863.  He was defeated by Union General George G. Meade in a three-day battle near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania that left nearly 51,000 men killed, wounded, or missing in action. While Lee's men were able to gather the vital supplies, they did little to draw Union forces away from Vicksburg, which fell to Federal troops on July 4, 1863. Many historians mark the twin Union victories at  Gettysburg  and Vicksburg , Mississippi, as the “turning point” in the Civil War. In November of 1863, President Lincoln traveled to the small Pennsylvania town and delivered the Gettysburg Address, which expressed firm commitment to preserving the Union and became one of the most iconic speeches in American history. 

Fact #7: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee did not meet on the field of battle until May of 1864.

Arguably the two most famous military personalities to emerge from the American Civil War were Ohio born Ulysses S. Grant , and Virginia born Robert E. Lee . The two men had very little in common. Lee was from a well respected First Family of Virginia, with ties to the Continental Army and the founding fathers of the nation. While Grant was from a middle-class family with no martial or family political ties. Both men graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point and served in the old army as well as the Mexican-American War. Lee was offered command of the federal army amassing in Washington, in 1861, but he declined the command and threw his hat in with the Confederacy. Lee's early war career got off to a rocky start, but he found his stride in June of 1862 after he assumed command of what he dubbed the Army of Northern Virginia. Grant, on the other hand, found early success in the war but was haunted by rumors of alcoholism. By 1863, the two men were by far the best generals on their respective sides. In March of 1864, Grant was promoted to lieutenant general and brought to the Eastern Theater of the war, where he and Lee engaged in a relentless campaign from May of 1864 to Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House eleven months later. 

Fact #8: The North won the Civil War.

After four years of conflict, the major Confederate armies surrendered to the United States in April of 1865 at Appomattox Court House and Bennett Place .  The war bankrupted much of the South, left its roads, farms, and factories in ruins, and all but wiped out an entire generation of men who wore the blue and the gray.  More than 620,000 men died in the Civil War, more than any other war in American history.  The southern states were occupied by Union soldiers, rebuilt, and gradually re-admitted to the United States over the course of twenty difficult years known as the Reconstruction Era. 

Fact #9: After the war was over, the Constitution was amended to free the slaves, to assure “equal protection under the law” for American citizens, and to grant black men the right to vote. 

During the war, Abraham Lincoln freed some slaves and allowed freedmen to join the Union Army as the  United States Colored Troops  (U.S.C.T.).  It was clear to many that it was only a matter of time before slavery would be fully abolished.  As the war drew to a close, but before the southern states were re-admitted to the United States, the northern states added the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution. The amendments are also known as the "Civil War Amendments."  The 13th Amendment abolished slavery in the United States, the 14th Amendment guaranteed that citizens would receive “equal protection under the law,” and the 15th Amendment granted black men the right to vote.  The 14th Amendment has played an ongoing role in American society as different groups of citizens continue to lobby for equal treatment by the government. 

Fact #10: Many Civil War battlefields are threatened by development.

The United States government has identified 384 battles that had a significant impact on the larger war.  Many of these battlefields have been developed—turned into shopping malls, pizza parlors, housing developments, etc.—and many more are threatened by development.  Since the end of the Civil War, veterans and other citizens have struggled to preserve the fields on which Americans fought and died.  The American Battlefield Trust and its partners have preserved tens of thousands of acres of battlefield land. 

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By: History.com Editors

Updated: April 20, 2023 | Original: October 15, 2009

The Civil War in the United States began in 1861, after decades of simmering tensions between northern and southern states over slavery, states’ rights and westward expansion. The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 caused seven southern states to secede and form the Confederate States of America; four more states soon joined them. The War Between the States, as the Civil War was also known, ended in Confederate surrender in 1865. The conflict was the costliest and deadliest war ever fought on American soil, with some 620,000 of 2.4 million soldiers killed, millions more injured and much of the South left in ruin.

Causes of the Civil War

In the mid-19th century, while the United States was experiencing an era of tremendous growth, a fundamental economic difference existed between the country’s northern and southern regions.

In the North, manufacturing and industry was well established, and agriculture was mostly limited to small-scale farms, while the South’s economy was based on a system of large-scale farming that depended on the labor of Black enslaved people to grow certain crops, especially cotton and tobacco.

Growing abolitionist sentiment in the North after the 1830s and northern opposition to slavery’s extension into the new western territories led many southerners to fear that the existence of slavery in America —and thus the backbone of their economy—was in danger.

Did you know? Confederate General Thomas Jonathan Jackson earned his famous nickname, "Stonewall," from his steadfast defensive efforts in the First Battle of Bull Run (First Manassas). At Chancellorsville, Jackson was shot by one of his own men, who mistook him for Union cavalry. His arm was amputated, and he died from pneumonia eight days later.

In 1854, the U.S. Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act , which essentially opened all new territories to slavery by asserting the rule of popular sovereignty over congressional edict. Pro- and anti-slavery forces struggled violently in “ Bleeding Kansas ,” while opposition to the act in the North led to the formation of the Republican Party , a new political entity based on the principle of opposing slavery’s extension into the western territories. After the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Dred Scott case (1857) confirmed the legality of slavery in the territories, the abolitionist John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry in 1859 convinced more and more southerners that their northern neighbors were bent on the destruction of the “peculiar institution” that sustained them. Abraham Lincoln ’s election in November 1860 was the final straw, and within three months seven southern states—South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas—had seceded from the United States.

Outbreak of the Civil War (1861)

Even as Lincoln took office in March 1861, Confederate forces threatened the federal-held Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. On April 12, after Lincoln ordered a fleet to resupply Sumter, Confederate artillery fired the first shots of the Civil War. Sumter’s commander, Major Robert Anderson, surrendered after less than two days of bombardment, leaving the fort in the hands of Confederate forces under Pierre G.T. Beauregard. Four more southern states—Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee—joined the Confederacy after Fort Sumter. Border slave states like Missouri, Kentucky and Maryland did not secede, but there was much Confederate sympathy among their citizens.

Though on the surface the Civil War may have seemed a lopsided conflict, with the 23 states of the Union enjoying an enormous advantage in population, manufacturing (including arms production) and railroad construction, the Confederates had a strong military tradition, along with some of the best soldiers and commanders in the nation. They also had a cause they believed in: preserving their long-held traditions and institutions, chief among these being slavery.

In the First Battle of Bull Run (known in the South as First Manassas) on July 21, 1861, 35,000 Confederate soldiers under the command of Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson forced a greater number of Union forces (or Federals) to retreat towards Washington, D.C., dashing any hopes of a quick Union victory and leading Lincoln to call for 500,000 more recruits. In fact, both sides’ initial call for troops had to be widened after it became clear that the war would not be a limited or short conflict.

The Civil War in Virginia (1862)

George B. McClellan —who replaced the aging General Winfield Scott as supreme commander of the Union Army after the first months of the war—was beloved by his troops, but his reluctance to advance frustrated Lincoln. In the spring of 1862, McClellan finally led his Army of the Potomac up the peninsula between the York and James Rivers, capturing Yorktown on May 4. The combined forces of Robert E. Lee and Jackson successfully drove back McClellan’s army in the Seven Days’ Battles (June 25-July 1), and a cautious McClellan called for yet more reinforcements in order to move against Richmond. Lincoln refused, and instead withdrew the Army of the Potomac to Washington. By mid-1862, McClellan had been replaced as Union general-in-chief by Henry W. Halleck, though he remained in command of the Army of the Potomac.

Lee then moved his troops northwards and split his men, sending Jackson to meet Pope’s forces near Manassas, while Lee himself moved separately with the second half of the army. On August 29, Union troops led by John Pope struck Jackson’s forces in the Second Battle of Bull Run (Second Manassas). The next day, Lee hit the Federal left flank with a massive assault, driving Pope’s men back towards Washington. On the heels of his victory at Manassas, Lee began the first Confederate invasion of the North. Despite contradictory orders from Lincoln and Halleck, McClellan was able to reorganize his army and strike at Lee on September 14 in Maryland, driving the Confederates back to a defensive position along Antietam Creek, near Sharpsburg.

On September 17, the Army of the Potomac hit Lee’s forces (reinforced by Jackson’s) in what became the war’s bloodiest single day of fighting. Total casualties at the Battle of Antietam (also known as the Battle of Sharpsburg) numbered 12,410 of some 69,000 troops on the Union side, and 13,724 of around 52,000 for the Confederates. The Union victory at Antietam would prove decisive, as it halted the Confederate advance in Maryland and forced Lee to retreat into Virginia. Still, McClellan’s failure to pursue his advantage earned him the scorn of Lincoln and Halleck, who removed him from command in favor of Ambrose E. Burnside . Burnside’s assault on Lee’s troops near Fredericksburg on December 13 ended in heavy Union casualties and a Confederate victory; he was promptly replaced by Joseph “Fighting Joe” Hooker , and both armies settled into winter quarters across the Rappahannock River from each other.

After the Emancipation Proclamation (1863-4)

Lincoln had used the occasion of the Union victory at Antietam to issue a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation , which freed all enslaved people in the rebellious states after January 1, 1863. He justified his decision as a wartime measure, and did not go so far as to free the enslaved people in the border states loyal to the Union. Still, the Emancipation Proclamation deprived the Confederacy of the bulk of its labor forces and put international public opinion strongly on the Union side. Some 186,000 Black Civil War soldiers would join the Union Army by the time the war ended in 1865, and 38,000 lost their lives.

In the spring of 1863, Hooker’s plans for a Union offensive were thwarted by a surprise attack by the bulk of Lee’s forces on May 1, whereupon Hooker pulled his men back to Chancellorsville. The Confederates gained a costly victory in the Battle of Chancellorsville , suffering 13,000 casualties (around 22 percent of their troops); the Union lost 17,000 men (15 percent). Lee launched another invasion of the North in June, attacking Union forces commanded by General George Meade on July 1 near Gettysburg, in southern Pennsylvania. Over three days of fierce fighting, the Confederates were unable to push through the Union center, and suffered casualties of close to 60 percent.

Meade failed to counterattack, however, and Lee’s remaining forces were able to escape into Virginia, ending the last Confederate invasion of the North. Also in July 1863, Union forces under Ulysses S. Grant took Vicksburg (Mississippi) in the Siege of Vicksburg , a victory that would prove to be the turning point of the war in the western theater. After a Confederate victory at Chickamauga Creek, Georgia, just south of Chattanooga, Tennessee, in September, Lincoln expanded Grant’s command, and he led a reinforced Federal army (including two corps from the Army of the Potomac) to victory in the Battle of Chattanooga in late November.

Toward a Union Victory (1864-65)

In March 1864, Lincoln put Grant in supreme command of the Union armies, replacing Halleck. Leaving William Tecumseh Sherman in control in the West, Grant headed to Washington, where he led the Army of the Potomac towards Lee’s troops in northern Virginia. Despite heavy Union casualties in the Battle of the Wilderness and at Spotsylvania (both May 1864), at Cold Harbor (early June) and the key rail center of Petersburg (June), Grant pursued a strategy of attrition, putting Petersburg under siege for the next nine months.

Sherman outmaneuvered Confederate forces to take Atlanta by September, after which he and some 60,000 Union troops began the famous “March to the Sea,” devastating Georgia on the way to capturing Savannah on December 21. Columbia and Charleston, South Carolina, fell to Sherman’s men by mid-February, and Jefferson Davis belatedly handed over the supreme command to Lee, with the Confederate war effort on its last legs. Sherman pressed on through North Carolina, capturing Fayetteville, Bentonville, Goldsboro and Raleigh by mid-April.

Meanwhile, exhausted by the Union siege of Petersburg and Richmond, Lee’s forces made a last attempt at resistance, attacking and captured the Federal-controlled Fort Stedman on March 25. An immediate counterattack reversed the victory, however, and on the night of April 2-3 Lee’s forces evacuated Richmond. For most of the next week, Grant and Meade pursued the Confederates along the Appomattox River, finally exhausting their possibilities for escape. Grant accepted Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House on April 9. On the eve of victory, the Union lost its great leader: The actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington on April 14. Sherman received Johnston’s surrender at Durham Station, North Carolina on April 26, effectively ending the Civil War.

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150 Years of Misunderstanding the Civil War

As the anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg approaches, it's time for America to question the popular account of a war that tore apart the nation.

In early July, on the 150 th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, pilgrims will crowd Little Round Top and the High Water Mark of Pickett's Charge. But venture beyond these famous shrines to battlefield valor and you'll find quiet sites like Iverson's Pits, which recall the inglorious reality of Civil War combat.

On July 1 st , 1863, Alfred Iverson ordered his brigade of North Carolinians across an open field. The soldiers marched in tight formation until Union riflemen suddenly rose from behind a stone wall and opened fire. Five hundred rebels fell dead or wounded "on a line as straight as a dress parade," Iverson reported. "They nobly fought and died without a man running to the rear. No greater gallantry and heroism has been displayed during this war."

Soldiers told a different story: of being "sprayed by the brains" of men shot in front of them, or hugging the ground and waving white kerchiefs. One survivor informed the mother of a comrade that her son was "shot between the Eye and ear" while huddled in a muddy swale. Of others in their ruined unit he wrote: "left arm was cut off, I think he will die... his left thigh hit and it was cut off." An artilleryman described one row of 79 North Carolinians executed by a single volley, their dead feet perfectly aligned. "Great God! When will this horrid war stop?" he wrote. The living rolled the dead into shallow trenches--hence the name "Iverson's Pits," now a grassy expanse more visited by ghost-hunters than battlefield tourists.

This and other scenes of unromantic slaughter aren't likely to get much notice during the Gettysburg sesquicentennial, the high water mark of Civil War remembrance. Instead, we'll hear a lot about Joshua Chamberlain's heroism and Lincoln's hallowing of the Union dead.

It's hard to argue with the Gettysburg Address. But in recent years, historians have rubbed much of the luster from the Civil War and questioned its sanctification. Should we consecrate a war that killed and maimed over a million Americans? Or should we question, as many have in recent conflicts, whether this was really a war of necessity that justified its appalling costs?

"We've decided the Civil War is a 'good war' because it destroyed slavery," says Fitzhugh Brundage, a historian at the University of North Carolina. "I think it's an indictment of 19 th century Americans that they had to slaughter each other to do that."

Similar reservations were voiced by an earlier generation of historians known as revisionists. From the 1920s to 40s, they argued that the war was not an inevitable clash over irreconcilable issues. Rather, it was a "needless" bloodbath, the fault of "blundering" statesmen and "pious cranks," mainly abolitionists. Some revisionists, haunted by World War I, cast all war as irrational, even "psychopathic."

World War II undercut this anti-war stance. Nazism was an evil that had to be fought. So, too, was slavery, which revisionists--many of them white Southerners--had cast as a relatively benign institution, and dismissed it as a genuine source of sectional conflict. Historians who came of age during the Civil Rights Movement placed slavery and emancipation at the center of the Civil War. This trend is now reflected in textbooks and popular culture. The Civil War today is generally seen as a necessary and ennobling sacrifice, redeemed by the liberation of four million slaves.

But cracks in this consensus are appearing with growing frequency, for example in studies like America Aflame , by historian David Goldfield. Goldfield states on the first page that the war was "America's greatest failure." He goes on to impeach politicians, extremists, and the influence of evangelical Christianity for polarizing the nation to the point where compromise or reasoned debate became impossible.

Unlike the revisionists of old, Goldfield sees slavery as the bedrock of the Southern cause and abolition as the war's great achievement. But he argues that white supremacy was so entrenched, North and South, that war and Reconstruction could never deliver true racial justice to freed slaves, who soon became subject to economic peonage, Black Codes, Jim Crow, and rampant lynching.

Few contemporary scholars go as far as Goldfield, but others are challenging key tenets of the current orthodoxy. Gary Gallagher, a leading Civil War historian at the University of Virginia, argues that the long-reigning emphasis on slavery and liberation distorts our understanding of the war and of how Americans thought in the 1860s. "There's an Appomattox syndrome--we look at Northern victory and emancipation and read the evidence backward," Gallagher says.

Very few Northerners went to war seeking or anticipating the destruction of slavery. They fought for Union, and the Emancipation Proclamation was a means to that end: a desperate measure to undermine the South and save a democratic nation that Lincoln called "the last best, hope of earth."

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Gallagher also feels that hindsight has dimmed recognition of how close the Confederacy came to achieving its aims. "For the South, a tie was as good as a win," he says. It needed to inflict enough pain to convince a divided Northern public that defeating the South wasn't worth the cost. This nearly happened at several points, when rebel armies won repeated battles in 1862 and 1863. As late as the summer of 1864, staggering casualties and the stalling of Union armies brought a collapse in Northern morale, cries for a negotiated peace, and the expectation that anti-war (and anti-black) Democrats would take the White House. The fall of Atlanta that September narrowly saved Lincoln and sealed the South's eventual surrender.

Allen Guelzo, director of Civil War studies at Gettysburg College, adds the Pennsylvania battle to the roster of near-misses for the South. In his new book, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion , he identifies points when Lee's army came within minutes of breaking the Union line. If it had, he believes the already demoralized Army of the Potomac "would have gone to pieces." With a victorious Southern army on the loose, threatening Northern cities, "it would have been game over for the Union."

Imagining these and other scenarios isn't simply an exercise in "what if" history, or the fulfillment of Confederate fantasy fiction. It raises the very real possibility that many thousands of Americans might have died only to entrench secession and slavery. Given this risk, and the fact that Americans at the time couldn't see the future, Andrew Delbanco wonders if we ourselves would have regarded the defeat of the South as worth pursuing at any price. "Vindicated causes are easy to endorse," he observes in The Abolitionist Imagination.

Recent scholarship has also cast new light on the scale and horror of the nation's sacrifice. Soldiers in the 1860s didn't wear dog tags, the burial site of most was unknown, and casualty records were sketchy and often lost. Those tallying the dead in the late 19 th century relied on estimates and assumptions to arrive at a figure of 618,000, a toll that seemed etched in stone until just a few years ago.

But J. David Hacker, a demographic historian, has used sophisticated analysis of census records to revise the toll upward by 20%, to an estimated 750,000, a figure that has won wide acceptance from Civil War scholars. If correct, the Civil War claimed more lives than all other American wars combined, and the increase in population since 1860 means that a comparable war today would cost 7.5 million lives.

This horrific toll doesn't include the more than half million soldiers who were wounded and often permanently disabled by amputation, lingering disease, psychological trauma and other afflictions. Veterans themselves rarely dwelled on this suffering, at least in their writing. "They walled off the horror and mangling and tended to emphasize the nobility of sacrifice," says Allen Guelzo. So did many historians, who cited the numbing totals of dead and wounded but rarely delved into the carnage or its societal impact.

That's changed dramatically with pioneering studies such as Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering , a 2008 examination of "the work of death" in the Civil War: killing, dying, burying, mourning, counting. "Civil War history has traditionally had a masculine view," says Faust, now president of Harvard, "it's all about generals and statesmen and glory." From reading the letters of women during the war, though, she sensed the depth of Americans' fear, grief, and despair. Writing her book amid "the daily drumbeat of loss" in coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan, Faust's focus on the horrors of this earlier war was reinforced.

"When we go to war, we ought to understand the costs," she says. "Human beings have an extraordinary capacity to forget that. Americans went into the Civil War imagining glorious battle, not gruesome disease and dismemberment."

Disease, in fact, killed roughly twice as many soldiers as did combat; dysentery and diarrhea alone killed over 44,000 Union soldiers, more than ten times the Northern dead at Gettysburg. Amputations were so routine, Faust notes, that soldiers and hospital workers frequently described severed limbs stacked "like cord wood," or heaps of feet, legs and arms being hauled off in carts, as if from "a human slaughterhouse." In an era before germ theory, surgeons' unclean saws and hands became vectors for infection that killed a quarter or more of the 60,000 or so men who underwent amputation.

Other historians have exposed the savagery and extent of the war that raged far from the front lines, including guerrilla attacks, massacres of Indians, extra-judicial executions and atrocities against civilians, some 50,000 of whom may have died as a result of the conflict. "There's a violence within and around the Civil War that doesn't fit the conventional, heroic narrative,' says Fitzhugh Brundage, whose research includes torture during the war. "When you incorporate these elements, the war looks less like a conflict over lofty principles and more like a cross-societal bloodletting."

In other words, it looks rather like ongoing wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan, which have influenced today's scholars and also their students. Brundage sees a growing number of returning veterans in his classes at the University of North Carolina, and new interest in previously neglected aspects of the Civil War era, such as military occupation, codes of justice, and the role of militias and insurgents.

More broadly, he senses an opening to question the limits of war as a force for good. Just as the fight against Nazism buttressed a moral vision of the Civil War, so too have the last decade's conflicts given us a fresh and cautionary viewpoint. "We should be chastened by our inability to control war and its consequences," Brundage says. "So much of the violence in the Civil War is laundered or sanctified by emancipation, but that result was by no means inevitable."

It's very hard, however, to see how emancipation might have been achieved by means other than war. The last century's revisionists thought the war was avoidable because they didn't regard slavery as a defining issue or evil. Almost no one suggests that today. The evidence is overwhelming that slavery was the "cornerstone" of the Southern cause, as the Confederacy's vice-president stated, and the source of almost every aspect of sectional division.

Slaveholders also resisted any infringement of their right to human property. Lincoln, among many others, advocated the gradual and compensated emancipation of slaves. This had been done in the British West Indies, and would later end slavery in Brazil and Cuba. In theory it could have worked here. Economists have calculated that the cost of the Civil War, estimated at over $10 billion in 1860 dollars, would have been more than enough to buy the freedom of every slave, purchase them land, and even pay reparations. But Lincoln's proposals for compensated emancipation fell on deaf ears, even in wartime Delaware, which was behind Union lines and clung to only 2,000 slaves, about 1.5% of the state's population.

Nor is there much credible evidence that the South's "peculiar institution" would have peacefully waned on its own. Slave-grown cotton was booming in 1860, and slaves in non-cotton states like Virginia were being sold to Deep South planters at record prices, or put to work on railroads and in factories. "Slavery was a virus that could attach itself to other forms," says historian Edward Ayers, president of the University of Richmond. "It was stronger than it had ever been and was growing stronger."

Most historians believe that without the Civil War, slavery would have endured for decades, possibly generations. Though emancipation was a byproduct of the war, not its aim, and white Americans clearly failed during Reconstruction to protect and guarantee the rights of freed slaves, the post-war amendments enshrined the promise of full citizenship and equality in the Constitution for later generations to fulfill.

What this suggests is that the 150 th anniversary of the Civil War is too narrow a lens through which to view the conflict. We are commemorating the four years of combat that began in 1861 and ended with Union victory in 1865. But Iraq and Afghanistan remind us, yet again, that the aftermath of war matters as much as its initial outcome. Though Confederate armies surrendered in 1865, white Southerners fought on by other means, wearing down a war-weary North that was ambivalent about if not hostile to black equality. Looking backwards, and hitting the pause button at the Gettysburg Address or the passage of the 13 th amendment, we see a "good" and successful war for freedom. If we focus instead on the run-up to war, when Lincoln pledged to not interfere with slavery in the South, or pan out to include the 1870s, when the nation abandoned Reconstruction, the story of the Civil War isn't quite so uplifting.

But that also is an arbitrary and insufficient frame. In 1963, a century after Gettysburg, Martin Luther King Jr. invoked Lincoln's words and the legacy of the Civil War in calling on the nation to pay its "promissory note" to black Americans, which it finally did, in part, by passing Civil Rights legislation that affirmed and enforced the amendments of the 1860s. In some respects, the struggle for racial justice, and for national cohesion, continues still.

From the distance of 150 years, Lincoln's transcendent vision at Gettysburg of a "new birth of freedom" seems premature. But he himself acknowledged the limits of remembrance. Rather than simply consecrate the dead with words, he said, it is for "us the living" to rededicate ourselves to the unfinished work of the Civil War.

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Space, time, and sectionalism, the historian's use of sectionalism and vice versa, … with liberty and justice for whom.

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What Twenty-First-Century Historians Have Said about the Causes of Disunion: A Civil War Sesquicentennial Review of the Recent Literature

I would like to thank David Dangerfield, Allen Driggers, Tiffany Florvil, Margaret Gillikin, Ramon Jackson, Evan Kutzler, Tyler Parry, David Prior, Tara Strauch, Beth Toyofuku, and Ann Tucker for their comments on an early version of this essay, and to extend special thanks to Mark M. Smith for perceptive criticism of multiple drafts. I would also like to thank Edward Linenthal for his expert criticism and guidance through the publication process and to express my gratitude to the four JAH readers, Ann Fabian, James M. McPherson, Randall Miller, and one anonymous reviewer, for their exceptionally thoughtful and helpful comments on the piece.

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Michael E. Woods, What Twenty-First-Century Historians Have Said about the Causes of Disunion: A Civil War Sesquicentennial Review of the Recent Literature, Journal of American History , Volume 99, Issue 2, September 2012, Pages 415–439, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jas272

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Professional historians can be an argumentative lot, but by the dawn of the twenty-first century, a broad consensus regarding Civil War causation clearly reigned. Few mainstream scholars would deny that Abraham Lincoln got it right in his second inaugural address—that slavery was “somehow” the cause of the war. Public statements by preeminent historians reaffirmed that slavery's centrality had been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Writing for the popular Civil War magazine North and South in November 2000, James M. McPherson pointed out that during the war, “few people in either North or South would have dissented” from Lincoln's slavery-oriented account of the war's origins. In ten remarkably efficient pages, McPherson dismantled arguments that the war was fought over tariffs, states' rights, or the abstract principle of secession. That same year, Charles Joyner penned a report on Civil War causation for release at a Columbia, South Carolina, press conference at the peak of the Palmetto State's Confederate flag debate. Endorsed by dozens of scholars and later published in Callaloo, it concluded that the “historical record … clearly shows that the cause for which the South seceded and fought a devastating war was slavery.” 1

Despite the impulse to close ranks amid the culture wars, however, professional historians have not abandoned the debate over Civil War causation. Rather, they have rightly concluded that there is not much of a consensus on the topic after all. Elizabeth Varon remarks that although “scholars can agree that slavery, more than any other issue, divided North and South, there is still much to be said about why slavery proved so divisive and why sectional compromise ultimately proved elusive.” And as Edward Ayers observes: “slavery and freedom remain the keys to understanding the war, but they are the place to begin our questions, not to end them.” 2 The continuing flood of scholarship on the sectional conflict suggests that many other historians agree. Recent work on the topic reveals two widely acknowledged truths: that slavery was at the heart of the sectional conflict and that there is more to learn about precisely what this means, not least because slavery was always a multifaceted issue.

This essay analyzes the extensive literature on Civil War causation published since 2000, a body of work that has not been analyzed at length. This survey cannot be comprehensive but seeks instead to clarify current debates in a field long defined by distinct interpretive schools—such as those of the progressives, revisionists, and modernization theorists—whose boundaries are now blurrier. To be sure, echoes still reverberate of the venerable arguments between historians who emphasize abstract economic, social, or political forces and those who stress human agency. The classic interpretive schools still command allegiance, with fundamentalists who accentuate concrete sectional differences dueling against revisionists, for whom contingency, chance, and irrationality are paramount. But recent students of Civil War causation have not merely plowed familiar furrows. They have broken fresh ground, challenged long-standing assumptions, and provided new perspectives on old debates. This essay explores three key issues that vein the recent scholarship: the geographic and temporal parameters of the sectional conflict, the relationship between sectionalism and nationalism, and the relative significance of race and class in sectional politics. All three problems stimulated important research long before 2000, but recent work has taken them in new directions. These themes are particularly helpful for navigating the recent scholarship, and by using them to organize and evaluate the latest literature, this essay underscores fruitful avenues for future study of a subject that remains central in American historiography. 3

Historians of the sectional conflict, like their colleagues in other fields, have consciously expanded the geographic and chronological confines of their research. Crossing the borders of the nation-state and reaching back toward the American Revolution, many recent studies of the war's origins situate the clash over slavery within a broad spatial and temporal context. The ramifications of this work will not be entirely clear until an enterprising scholar incorporates those studies into a new synthesis, but this essay will offer a preliminary evaluation.

Scholarship following the transnational turn in American history has silenced lingering doubts that nineteenth-century Americans of all regions, classes, and colors were deeply influenced by people, ideas, and events from abroad. Historians have long known that the causes of the Civil War cannot be understood outside the context of international affairs, particularly the Mexican-American War (1846–1848). Three of the most influential narrative histories of the Civil War era open either on Mexican soil (those written by Allan Nevins and James McPherson) or with the transnational journey from Mexico City to Washington of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (David M. Potter's The Impending Crisis ). The domestic political influence of the annexation of Texas, Caribbean filibustering, and the Ostend Manifesto, a widely publicized message written to President Franklin Pierce in 1854 that called for the acquisition of Cuba, are similarly well established. 4

Recent studies by Edward Bartlett Rugemer and Matthew J. Clavin, among others, build on that foundation to show that the international dimensions of the sectional conflict transcended the bitterly contested question of territorial expansion. Rugemer, for instance, demonstrates that Caribbean emancipation informed U.S. debates over slavery from the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) through Reconstruction. Situating sectional politics within the Atlantic history of slavery and abolition, he illustrates how arguments for and against U.S. slavery drew from competing interpretations of emancipation in the British West Indies. Britain's “mighty experiment” thus provided “useable history for an increasingly divided nation.” Proslavery ideologues learned that abolitionism sparked insurrection, that Africans and their descendants would become idlers or murderers or both if released from bondage, and that British radicals sought to undermine the peculiar institution wherever it persisted. To slavery's foes, the same history revealed that antislavery activism worked, that emancipation could be peaceful and profitable, and that servitude, not skin tone, degraded enslaved laborers. Clavin's study of American memory of Toussaint L'Ouverture indicates that the Haitian Revolution cast an equally long shadow over antebellum history. Construed as a catastrophic race war, the revolution haunted slaveholders with the prospect of an alliance between ostensibly savage slaves and fanatical whites. Understood as a hopeful story of the downtrodden overthrowing their oppressors, however, Haitian history furnished abolitionists, white and black, with an inspiring example of heroic self-liberation by the enslaved. By the 1850s it also furnished abolitionists, many of whom were frustrated by the abysmally slow progress of emancipation in the United States, with a precedent for swift, violent revolution and the vindication of black masculinity. The Haitian Revolution thus provided “resonant, polarizing, and ultimately subversive symbols” for antislavery and proslavery partisans alike and helped “provoke a violent confrontation and determine the fate of slavery in the United States.” 5

These findings will surprise few students of Civil War causation, but they demonstrate that the international aspects of the sectional conflict did not begin and end with Manifest Destiny. They also encourage Atlantic historians to pay more attention to the nineteenth century, particularly to the period after British emancipation. Rugemer and Clavin point out that deep connections among Atlantic rim societies persisted far into the nineteenth century and that, like other struggles over New World slavery, the American Civil War is an Atlantic story. One of their most stimulating contributions may therefore be to encourage Atlantic historians to widen their temporal perspectives to include the middle third of the nineteenth century. By foregrounding the hotly contested public memory of the Haitian Revolution, Rugemer and Clavin push the story of American sectionalism back into the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, suggesting that crossing geographic boundaries can go hand in hand with stretching the temporal limits of sectionalism. 6

The internationalizing impulse has also nurtured economic interpretations of the sectional struggle. Brian Schoen, Peter Onuf, and Nicholas Onuf situate antebellum politics within the context of global trade, reinvigorating economic analysis of sectionalism without summoning the ghosts of Charles Beard and Mary Beard. Readers may balk at their emphasis on tariff debates, but these histories are plainly not Confederate apologia. As Schoen points out, chattel slavery expanded in the American South, even as it withered throughout most of the Atlantic world, because southern masters embraced the nineteenth century's most important crop: cotton. Like the oil titans of a later age, southern cotton planters reveled in the economic indispensability of their product. Schoen adopts a cotton-centered perspective from which to examine southern political economy, from the earliest cotton boom to the secession crisis. “Broad regional faith in cotton's global power,” he argues, “both informed secessionists' actions and provided them an indispensable tool for mobilizing otherwise reluctant confederates.” Planters' commitment to the production and overseas sale of cotton shaped southern politics and business practices. It impelled westward expansion, informed planters' jealous defense of slavery, and wedded them to free trade. An arrogant faith in their commanding economic position gave planters the impetus and the confidence to secede when northern Republicans threatened to block the expansion of slavery and increase the tariff. The Onufs reveal a similar dynamic at work in their complementary study, Nations, Markets, and War. Like Schoen, they portray slaveholders as forward-looking businessmen who espoused free-trade liberalism in defense of their economic interests. Entangled in political competition with Yankee protectionists throughout the early national and antebellum years, slaveholders seceded when it became clear that their vision for the nation's political economy—most importantly its trade policy—could no longer prevail. 7

These authors examine Civil War causation within a global context, though in a way more reminiscent of traditional economic history than similar to other recent transnational scholarship. But perhaps the most significant contribution made by these authors lies beyond internationalizing American history. After all, most historians of the Old South have recognized that the region's economic and political power depended on the Atlantic cotton trade, and scholars of the Confederacy demonstrated long ago that overconfidence in cotton's international leverage led southern elites to pursue a disastrous foreign policy. What these recent studies reveal is that cotton-centered diplomatic and domestic politics long predated southern independence and had roots in the late eighteenth century, when slaveholders' decision to enlarge King Cotton's domain set them on a turbulent political course that led to Appomattox. The Onufs and Schoen, then, like Rugemer and Clavin, expand not only the geographic parameters of the sectional conflict but also its temporal boundaries. 8

These four important histories reinforce recent work that emphasizes the eruption of the sectional conflict at least a generation before the 1820 Missouri Compromise. If the conflict over Missouri was a “firebell in the night,” as Thomas Jefferson called it, it was a rather tardy alarm. This scholarship mirrors a propensity among political historians—most notably scholars of the civil rights movement—to write “long histories.” Like their colleagues who dispute the Montgomery-to-Memphis narrative of the civil rights era, political historians of the early republic have questioned conventional periodization by showing that sectionalism did not spring fully grown from the head of James Tallmadge, the New York congressman whose February 1819 proposal to bar the further extension of slavery into Missouri unleashed the political storm that was calmed, for the moment, by the Missouri Compromise. Matthew Mason, for instance, maintains that “there never was a time between the Revolution and the Civil War in which slavery went unchallenged.” Mason shows that political partisans battered their rivals with the club of slavery, with New England Federalists proving especially adept at denouncing their Jeffersonian opponents as minions of southern slaveholders. In a series of encounters, from the closure of the Atlantic slave trade in 1807 to the opening (fire)bell of the Missouri crisis, slavery remained a central question in American politics. Even the outbreak of war in 1812 failed to suppress the issue. 9

A complementary study by John Craig Hammond confirms that slavery roiled American politics from the late eighteenth century on and that its westward expansion proved especially divisive years before the Missouri fracas. As America's weak national government continued to bring more western acreage under its nominal control, it had to accede to local preferences regarding slavery. Much of the fierce conflict over slavery therefore occurred at the territorial and state levels. Hammond astutely juxtaposes the histories of slave states such as Louisiana and Missouri alongside those of Ohio and Indiana, where proslavery policies were defeated. In every case, local politics proved decisive. Neither the rise nor the extent of the cotton kingdom was a foregone conclusion, and the quarrel over its expansion profoundly influenced territorial and state politics north and south of the Ohio River. Bringing the growing scholarship on both early republic slavery and proslavery ideology into conversation with political history, Hammond demonstrates that the bitterness of the Missouri debate stemmed from that dispute's contentious prehistory, not from its novelty. Just as social, economic, and intellectual historians have traced the “long history” of the antebellum South back to its once relatively neglected early national origins, political historians have uncovered the deep roots of political discord over slavery's expansion. 10

Scholars have applied the “long history” principle to other aspects of Civil War causation as well. In his study of the slave power thesis, Leonard L. Richards finds that northern anxieties about slaveholders' inordinate political influence germinated during the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Jan Lewis's argument that the concessions made to southern delegates at the convention emboldened them to demand special protection for slavery suggests that those apprehensions were sensible. David L. Lightner demonstrates that northern demands for a congressional ban on the domestic slave trade, designed to strike a powerful and, thanks to the interstate commerce clause, constitutional blow against slavery extension emerged during the first decade of the nineteenth century and informed antislavery strategy for the next fifty years. Richard S. Newman emphasizes that abolitionist politics long predated William Lloyd Garrison's founding of the Liberator in 1831. Like William W. Freehling, who followed the “road to disunion” back to the American Revolution, Newman commences his study of American abolitionism with the establishment of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in 1775. Most recently, Christopher Childers has invited historians to explore the early history of the doctrine of popular sovereignty. 11

Skeptics might ask where the logic of these studies will lead. Why not push the origins of sectional strife even further back into colonial history? Why not begin, as did a recent overview of Civil War causation, with the initial arrival of African slaves in Virginia in 1619? This critique has a point—hopefully we will never read an article called “Christopher Columbus and the Coming of the American Civil War”—but two virtues of recent work on the long sectional conflict merit emphasis. First, its extended view mirrors the very long, if chronically selective, memories of late antebellum partisans. By the 1850s few sectional provocateurs failed to trace northern belligerence toward the South, and vice versa, back to the eighteenth century. Massachusetts Republican John B. Alley reminded Congress in April 1860 that slavery had been “a disturbing element in our national politics ever since the organization of the Government.” “In fact,” Alley recalled, “political differences were occasioned by it, and sectional prejudices grew out of it, at a period long anterior to the formation of the Federal compact.” Eight tumultuous months later, U.S. senator Robert Toombs recounted to the Georgia legislature a litany of northern aggressions and insisted that protectionism and abolitionism had tainted Yankee politics from “ the very first Congress .” Tellingly, the study of historical memory, most famously used to analyze remembrance of the Civil War, has moved the study of Civil War causation more firmly into the decades between the nation's founding and the Missouri Compromise. Memories of the Haitian Revolution shaped antebellum expectations for emancipation. Similarly, recollections of southern economic sacrifice during Jefferson's 1807 embargo and the War of 1812 heightened white southerners' outrage over their “exclusion” from conquered Mexican territory more than three decades later. And as Margot Minardi has shown, Massachusetts abolitionists used public memory of the American Revolution to champion emancipation and racial equality. The Missouri-to-Sumter narrative conceals that these distant events haunted the memories of late antebellum Americans. Early national battles over slavery did not make the Civil War inevitable, but in the hands of propagandists they could make the war seem inevitable to many contemporaries. 12

Second, proponents of the long view of Civil War causation have not made a simplistic argument for continuity. Elizabeth Varon's study of the evolution of disunion as a political concept and rhetorical device from 1789 to 1859 demonstrates that long histories need not obscure change over time. Arguing that “sectional tensions deriving from the diverging interests of the free labor North and the slaveholding South” were “as old as the republic itself,” Varon adopts a long perspective on sectional tension. But her nuanced analysis of the diverse and shifting political uses of disunion rhetoric suggests that what historians conveniently call the sectional conflict was in fact a series of overlapping clashes, each with its own dynamics and idiom. Quite literally, the terms of sectional debate remained in flux. The language of disunion came in five varieties—“a prophecy of national ruin, a threat of withdrawal from the federal compact, an accusation of treasonous plotting, a process of sectional alienation, and a program for regional independence”—and the specific meanings of each cannot be interpreted accurately without regard to historical context, for “their uses changed and shifted over time.” To cite just one example, the concept of disunion as a process of increasing alienation between North and South gained credibility during the 1850s as proslavery and antislavery elements clashed, often violently, over the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the extension of slavery into Kansas. Republican senator William Henry Seward's famous “irrepressible conflict” speech of 1858 took this interpretation of disunion, one that had long languished on the radical margins of sectional politics, and thrust it into mainstream discourse. Shifting political circumstances reshaped the terms of political debate from the 1830s, when the view of disunion as an irreversible process flourished only among abolitionists and southern extremists, to the late 1850s, when a leading contender for the presidential nomination of a major party could express it openly. 13

Consistent with Varon's emphasis on the instability of political rhetoric, other recent studies of Civil War causation have spotlighted two well-known and important forks in the road to disunion. Thanks to their fresh perspective on the crisis of 1819–1821, scholars of early national sectionalism have identified the Missouri struggle as the first of these turning points. The battle over slavery in Missouri, Robert Pierce Forbes argues, was “a crack in the master narrative” of American history that fundamentally altered how Americans thought about slavery and the Union. In the South, it nurtured a less crassly self-interested defense of servitude. Simultaneously, it tempted northerners to conceptually separate “the South” from “America,” thereby sectionalizing the moral problem of slavery and conflating northern values and interests with those of the nation. The intensity of the crisis demonstrated that the slavery debate threatened the Union, prompting Jacksonian-era politicians to suppress the topic and stymie sectionalists for a generation. But even as the Missouri controversy impressed moderates with the need for compromise, it fostered “a new clarity in the sectional politics of the United States and moved each section toward greater coherence on the slavery issue” by refining arguments for and against the peculiar institution. The competing ideologies that defined antebellum sectional politics coalesced during the contest over Missouri, now portrayed as a milestone rather than a starter's pistol. 14

A diverse body of scholarship identifies a second period of discontinuity stretching from 1845 to 1850. This literature confirms rather than challenges traditional periodization, for those years have long marked the beginning of the “Civil War era.” This time span has attracted considerable attention because the slavery expansion debate intensified markedly between the annexation of Texas in 1845 and the Compromise of 1850. Not surprisingly, recent work on slavery's contested westward extension continues to present the late 1840s as a key turning point—perhaps a point of no return—in the sectional conflict. As Michael S. Green puts it, by 1848, “something in American political life clearly had snapped. … [T]he genies that [James K.] Polk, [David] Wilmot, and their allies had let out of the bottle would not be put back in.” 15

Scholars not specifically interested in slavery expansion have also identified the late 1840s as a decisive period. In his history of southern race mythology—the notion that white southerners' “Norman” ancestry elevated them over Saxon-descended northerners—Ritchie Devon Watson Jr. identifies these years as a transition period between two theories of sectional difference. White southerners' U.S. nationalism persisted into the 1840s, he argues, and although they recognized cultural differences between the Yankees and themselves, the dissimilarities were not imagined in racial terms. After 1850, however, white southerners increasingly argued for innate differences between the white southern “race” and its ostensibly inferior northern rival. This mythology was a “key element” in the “flowering of southern nationalism before and during the Civil War.” Susan-Mary Grant has shown that northern opinion of the South underwent a simultaneous shift, with the slave power thesis gaining widespread credibility by the late 1840s. The year 1850 marked an economic turning point as well. Marc Egnal posits that around that year, a generation of economic integration between North and South gave way to an emerging “Lake Economy,” which knit the Northwest and Northeast into an economic and political alliance at odds with the South. Taken together, this scholarship reaffirms what historians have long suspected about the sectional conflict: despite sectionalism's oft-recalled roots in the early national period, the late 1840s represents an important period of discontinuity. It is unsurprising that these years climaxed with a secession scare and a makeshift compromise reached not through bona fide give-and-take but rather through the political dexterity of Senator Stephen A. Douglas. 16

That Douglas succeeded where the eminent Henry Clay had failed suggests another late 1840s discontinuity that deserves more scholarly attention. Thirty-six years older than the Little Giant, Clay was already Speaker of the House when Douglas was born in 1813. Douglas's shepherding of Clay's smashed omnibus bill through the Senate in 1850 “marked a changing of the guard from an older generation, whose time already might have passed, to a new generation whose time had yet to come.” This passing of the torch symbolized a broader shift in political personnel. The Thirty-First Congress, which passed the compromise measures of 1850, was a youthful assembly. The average age for representatives was forty-three, only two were older than sixty-two, and more than half were freshmen. The Senate was similarly youthful, particularly its Democratic members, fewer than half of whom had reached age fifty. Moreover, the deaths of John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster between March 1850 and October 1852 signaled to many observers the end of an era. In 1851 members of the University of Virginia's Southern Rights Association reminded their southern peers that “soon the destinies of the South must be entrusted to our keeping. The present occupants of the arena of action must soon pass away, and we be called upon to fill their places. … It becomes therefore our sacred duty to prepare for the contest.” 17

Students of Civil War causation would do well to probe this intergenerational transfer of power. This analysis need not revive the argument, most popular in the 1930s and 1940s, that the “blundering generation” of hot-headed and self-serving politicos who grasped the reins of power around 1850 brought on an unnecessary war. Caricaturing the rising generation as exceptionally inept is not required to profitably contrast the socioeconomic environments, political contexts, and intellectual milieus in which Clay's and Douglas's respective generations matured. These differences, and the generational conflict that they engendered, may have an important bearing on both the origins and the timing of the Civil War. Peter Carmichael's study of Virginia's last antebellum generation explores this subject in detail. Historians have long recognized that disproportionately high numbers of young white southerners supported secession. Carmichael offers a compelling explanation for why this was so, without portraying his subjects as mediocre statesmen or citing the eternal impetuousness of youth. Deftly blending cultural, social, economic, and political history, Carmichael rejects the notion that young Virginia gentlemen who came of age in the late 1850s were immature, impassioned, and reckless. They were, he argues, idealistic and ambitious men who believed deeply in progress but worried that their elders had squandered Virginia's traditional economic and political preeminence. Confronted with their state's apparent degeneration and their own lack of opportunity for advancement, Carmichael's young Virginians endorsed a pair of solutions that put them at odds with their conservative elders: economic diversification and, after John Brown's 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, southern independence. Whether this generational dynamic extended beyond Virginia remains to be seen. But other recent works, including Stephen Berry's study of young white men in the Old South and Jon Grinspan's essay on youthful Republicans during the 1860 presidential campaign, indicate that similar concerns about progress, decline, and sectional destiny haunted many young minds on the eve of the Civil War. More work in this area is necessary, especially on how members of the new generation remembered the sectional conflict that had been raging since before they were born. Clearly, though, the generation that ascended to national leadership during the 1850s came of age in a very different world than had its predecessor. Further analysis of this shift promises to link the insights of the long sectional conflict approach (particularly regarding public memory) with the emphasis on late 1840s discontinuity that veins recent scholarship on sectionalism. 18

Recent historians have challenged conventional periodization by expanding the chronological scope of the sectional conflict, even as they confirm two key moments of historical discontinuity. This work revises older interpretations of Civil War causation without overturning them. A second trend in the literature, however, is potentially more provocative. A number of powerfully argued studies building on David Potter's classic essay, “The Historian's Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa,” have answered his call for closer scrutiny of the “seemingly manifest difference between the loyalties of a nationalistic North and a sectionalistic South.” Impatient with historians who read separatism into all aspects of prewar southern politics or Unionism into all things northern, Potter admonished scholars not to project Civil War loyalties back into the antebellum period. A more nuanced approach would reveal “that in the North as well as in the South there were deep sectional impulses, and support or nonsupport of the Union was sometimes a matter of sectional tactics rather than of national loyalty.” Recent scholars have accepted Potter's challenge, and their findings contribute to an emerging reinterpretation of the sectional conflict and the timing of secession. 19

Disentangling northern from national interests and values has been difficult thanks in part to the Civil War itself (in which “the North” and “the Union” overlapped, albeit imperfectly) and because of the northern victory and the temptation to classify the Old South as an un-American aberration. But several recent studies have risen to the task. Challenging the notion that the antebellum North must have been nationalistic because of its opposition to slavery and its role in the Civil War, Susan-Mary Grant argues that by the 1850s a stereotyped view of the South and a sense of moral and economic superiority had created a powerful northern sectional identity. Championed by the Republican party, this identity flowered into an exclusionary nationalism in which the South served as a negative reference point for the articulation of ostensibly national values, goals, and identities based on the North's flattering self-image. This sectionalism-cum-nationalism eventually corroded national ties by convincing northerners that the South represented an internal threat to the nation. Although this vision became genuinely national after the war, in the antebellum period it was sectionally specific and bitterly divisive. “It was not the case,” Grant concludes, “that the northern ideology of the antebellum period was American, truly national, and supportive of the Union and the southern ideology was wholly sectional and destructive of the Union.” Matthew Mason makes a related point about early national politics, noting that the original sectionalists were antislavery New England Federalists whose flirtation with secession in 1815 crippled their party. Never simply the repository of authentic American values, the nineteenth-century North developed a sectional identity in opposition to an imagined (though not fictitious) South. Only victory in the Civil War allowed for the reconstruction of the rest of the nation in this image. 20

If victory in the war obscured northern sectionalism, it was the defense of slavery, coupled with defeat, that has distorted our view of American nationalism in the Old South. The United States was founded as a slaveholding nation, and there was unfortunately nothing necessarily un-American about slavery in the early nineteenth century. Slavery existed in tension with, not purely in opposition to, the nation's perennially imperfect political institutions, and its place in the young republic was a hotly contested question with a highly contingent resolution. Moreover, despite their pretensions to being an embattled minority, southern elites long succeeded in harnessing national ideals and federal power to their own interests. Thus, defense of slavery was neither inevitably nor invariably secessionist. This is a key theme of Robert Bonner's expertly crafted history of the rise and fall of proslavery American nationalism. Adopting a long-sectional-conflict perspective, Bonner challenges historians who have “conflate[d] an understandable revulsion at proslavery ideology with a willful disassociation of bondage from prevailing American norms.” He details the efforts of proslavery southerners to integrate slavery into national identity and policy and to harmonize slaveholding with American expansionism, republicanism, constitutionalism, and evangelicalism. Appropriating the quintessentially American sense of national purpose, proslavery nationalists “invited outsiders to consider [slavery's] compatibility with broadly shared notions of American values and visions of a globally redeeming national mission.” This effort ended in defeat, but not because proslavery southerners chronically privileged separatism over nationalism. Rather, it was their failure to bind slavery to American nationalism—signaled by the Republican triumph in 1860—that finally drove slaveholders to secede. Lincoln's victory “effectively ended the prospects for achieving proslavery Americanism within the federal Union,” forcing slavery's champions to pin their hopes to a new nation-state. Confederate nationalism was more a response to the demise of proslavery American nationalism than the cause of its death. 21

Other recent studies of slaveholders' efforts to nationalize their goals and interests complement Bonner's skilled analysis. Matthew J. Karp casts proslavery politicians not as jumpy sectionalists but as confident imperialists who sponsored an ambitious and costly expansion of American naval power to protect slavery against foreign encroachment and to exert national influence overseas. For these slaveholding nationalists, “federal power was not a danger to be feared, but a force to be utilized,” right up to the 1860 election. Similarly, Brian Schoen has explored cotton planters' efforts to ensure that national policy on tariff rates and slavery's territorial status remained favorable to their interests. As cotton prices boomed during the 1850s, planters grew richer and the stakes grew higher, especially as their national political power waned with the ascension of the overtly sectional Republican party. The simultaneous increase in planters' economic might and decline in their political dominance made for an explosive mixture that shattered the bonds of the Union. Still, one must not focus solely on cases in which proslavery nationalism was thwarted, for its successes convinced many northerners of the veracity of the slave power thesis, helping further corrode the Union. James L. Huston shows that both southern efforts to nationalize property rights in slaves and the prospect of slavery becoming a national institution—in the sense that a fully integrated national market could bring slave and free labor into competition—fueled northern sectionalism and promoted the rise of the Republican party. Proslavery nationalism and its policy implications thus emboldened the political party whose victory in 1860 convinced proslavery southerners that their goals could not be realized within the Union. 22

As the standard-bearers of northern and southern interests battled for national power, both sides emphasized that their respective ideologies were consistent with the nation's most cherished principles. Shearer Davis Bowman has argued that “northern and southern partisans of white sectionalism tended to see their respective sections as engaged in the high-minded defense of vested interests, outraged rights and liberties, and imperiled honor, all embedded in a society and way of life they deemed authentically American.” In a sense, both sides were right. Recent scholarship in such varied fields as intellectual, religious, political, and literary history suggests that although often incompatible, the values and ideals of the contending sections flowed from a common source. Work by Margaret Abruzzo on proslavery and antislavery humanitarianism, John Patrick Daly and Mark A. Noll on evangelical Protestantism, Sean Wilentz on political democracy, and Diane N. Capitani on domestic sentimental fiction suggests that the highly politicized differences between northern and southern ideologies masked those ideologies' common intellectual roots. Some scholars have argued for more fundamental difference, maintaining that southern thinkers roundly rejected democracy and liberal capitalism, while others have gone too far in the other direction in presenting northern and southern whites as equally committed to liberalism. But the dominant thrust of recent work on sectional ideologies suggests that they represented two hostile sides of a single coin minted at the nation's founding. Since a coin flip cannot end in a tie, both sides struggled for control of the national government to put their incompatible ideals into practice. The nationalization of northern ideals was a hotly contested outcome, made possible only by armed conflict. Conversely, the sectionalization of white southern ideals was not inevitable. Proponents of both sections drew on nationalism and sectionalism alike, embracing the former when they felt powerful and the latter when they felt weak. “As long as the Government is on our side,” proslavery Democrat and future South Carolina governor Francis W. Pickens wrote in 1857, “I am for sustaining it and using its power for our benefit. … [if] our opponents reverse the present state of things then I am for war .” 23

Together, recent studies of northern sectionalism and southern nationalism make a compelling case for why the Civil War broke out when it did. If the South was always a separatist minority and if the North always defended the American way, secession might well have come long before 1861. It is more helpful to view the sectional conflict as one between equally authentic (not morally equivalent) strands of American nationalism grappling for the power to govern the entire country according to sectionally specific values. Southern slaveholders ruled what was in many ways the weaker section, but constitutional privileges such as the infamous three-fifths clause, along with other advantageous provisions such as the rule requiring a two-thirds majority in the nominations of Democratic presidential candidates, allowed them to remain dominant prior to 1860, until their successes aroused a sense of northern sectionalism robust enough to lift the Republican party into power. Almost overnight, the proslavery nationalist project collapsed. Only then did decisive numbers of southern whites countenance disunion, a drastic measure whose use had long been resisted within the South. The Civil War erupted when northern sectionalism grew powerful enough to undermine southern nationalism. 24

In the model of Civil War causation sketched above, northern voters who joined the Republicans fretted over the fate of liberty in a slaveholding republic. But whose liberty was at stake? Recent scholarship powerfully demonstrates that for moderate opponents of slavery the most damnable aspect of the institution was not what it did to slaves but what it allowed slaveholders to do to northern whites. Popular antislavery grew from trepidation about the power of the slaveholding class and its threat to republican liberty, not from uproar against proslavery racism and racial oppression. And since this concern fueled the Republican party's rapid growth and 1860 presidential triumph, white northerners' indignant response to slaveholders' clout contributed significantly to the coming of the war by providing secessionists with a pretext for disunion. According to this interpretation of northern politics, slavery remains at the root of the sectional conflict even though racial egalitarianism did not inspire the most popular brands of antislavery politics and even though many of the debates over slavery, as Eric Foner has pointed out, “were only marginally related to race.” At the same time, recent scholarship on southern politics foregrounds slave agency and persuasively demonstrates that conflict between masters and slaves directly affected national affairs. If the fate of the enslaved did not preoccupy most northern whites, the same cannot be said of their southern counterparts, whose politics are intelligible only in the context of slave resistance. In sum, recent work confirms the centrality of slavery in the coming of the war in a very specific and nuanced way, showing that the actions and contested status of enslaved people influenced southern politics directly and northern politics more obliquely. This work reveals an asymmetry in the politics of slavery: in the South it revolved around maintaining control over slaves in the name of white supremacy and planters' interests, while in the North it centered on the problem of the slaveholding class. 25

Moral indignation at racial prejudice in the twentieth century does not necessarily provide the key to an understanding of the dispute between the sections in the nineteenth century. While some abolitionists were indignant at the slave system and what it did to black men, many more northerners became antisouthern and antislavery because of what the slave system did or threatened to do to them. A failure to recognize this can easily lead us into a blind alley of oversimplification, and to view the events of a hundred years ago as a morality play with heroes and villains rather than a plausible presentation of a human dilemma.

Many twenty-first century scholars have taken this point to heart while implicitly challenging Gara's stark contrast between moral and self-interested antislavery. They stress the primary importance of white liberty in popular antislavery critiques but show that slavery's “moderate” opponents were no less morally outraged than their “radical” counterparts. Slavery could be condemned on moral grounds for a wide variety of reasons, some of which had much to do with enslaved people and some of which—whether they stressed the degeneracy of southern society, the undemocratic influence of slaveholders' political clout, or the threat that proslavery zealots posed to civil liberties—did not. Thus, recent scholars have made Gara's “crucial distinction” while underlining the moral dimensions of ostensibly moderate, conservative, or racist antislavery arguments. Popular antislavery strove to protect democratic politics from the machinations of a legally privileged and economically potent ruling class. Slaveholders' inordinate political power was itself a moral problem. These findings may prompt historians to reconsider the relative emphasis placed on class and race in the origins and meanings of the Civil War, particularly regarding the political behavior of the nonabolitionist northern majority. 27

Numerous recent studies emphasize that perceived threats to white freedom pushed northerners to oppose the slave power, support the Republican party, and prosecute the Civil War on behalf of liberty and the Union. Nicole Etcheson's study of the violent struggle between proslavery and antislavery forces over Kansas during the mid-1850s contends that the key issue at stake was freedom for white settlers. During the Civil War many Kansans who had fought for the admission of their state under an antislavery constitution applauded emancipation, but Etcheson persuasively argues that “Bleeding Kansas began as a struggle to secure the political liberties of whites.” Racist pioneers from both sections battled to ensure that the plains would remain a haven for white freedom, disagreeing primarily over slavery's compatibility with that goal. Similarly, Matthew Mason shows that antislavery politics in the early national period, spearheaded by Federalists, thrived only when northern voters recognized “how slavery impinged on their rights and interests.” Russell McClintock's analysis of the 1860 election and northerners' reaction to secession and the bombardment of Fort Sumter indicates that anxiety over slaveholders' power encouraged a decisive, violent northern response. As the antislavery position edged closer to the mainstream of northern politics, critiques of slavery grounded in sympathy for enslaved people faded as less philanthropic assaults on the institution proliferated. Carol Lasser's study of the shifting emphasis of antislavery rhetoric demonstrates that between the 1830s and the 1850s, “self-interest replaced sin as a basis for antislavery organizing,” as antislavery appeals increasingly “stressed the self-interest of northern farmers and workers—mainly white and mainly male.” Ultimately, popular antislavery cast “free white men, rather than enslaved African American women,” as “the victims of ‘the peculiar institution.’” 28

Even histories of fugitive slave cases underscore the preeminence of white liberty as the activating concern for many northerners. As the historian Earl M. Maltz has pointed out, the fugitive slave issue was never isolated from other political controversies. Thanks to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which seemed to prove the existence of a southern plot to spread slavery onto previously free western soil, fugitive slave cases during and after 1854 aroused increased hostility among white northerners who suspected that slaveholders threatened the liberties of all Americans. Those fears intensified throughout the 1850s in response to cases in which free northerners stood trial for violation of the Fugitive Slave Act. In two of the three cases explored by Steven Lubet the defendants were not runaway slaves but predominantly white northerners accused of abetting fugitives from slavery. The Fugitive Slave Act's criminalization of noncompliance with slave catchers proved especially odious. “For all of its blatant unfairness,” Lubet argues, “the Act might have been considered tolerable in the North—at least among non-abolitionists—if it had been directed only at blacks.” It was not, of course, and some of the act's most celebrated cases placed white northerners in legal jeopardy for crossing swords with the slave power. Two recent studies of the Joshua Glover case reinforce this point. Formerly a slave in St. Louis, Glover escaped to Wisconsin and, with the help of sympathetic white residents, from there to Canada in 1854. But the dramatic confrontation between free-state citizens and the slaveholder-dominated federal government only began with Glover's successful flight, since the political reverberations of the case echoed for many years after Glover reached Canadian soil. Debates over the rights and duties of citizens, over the boundaries of state and federal sovereignty, and over the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Act hinged on the prosecution of the primarily white Wisconsinites who aided Glover's escape. None gained more notoriety than Sherman Booth, the Milwaukee newspaper editor whose case bounced between state and federal courts from 1854 to 1859, and whose attorney, Byron Paine, capitalized on his own resulting popularity to win a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Long after attention left Glover, who was undoubtedly relieved to be out of the public eye, conflicts over northern state rights and individual rights highlighted the threat to white liberty posed by the slave power and its federal agents. 29

Of course, the white northerners prosecuted under proslavery law would have remained in obscurity if not for the daring escapes made by enslaved people. As Stanley Harrold has shown, runaway slaves sparked dozens of bloody skirmishes in the antebellum borderland between slavery and freedom. To stress the importance of conflicts over white liberty in the coming of the Civil War is not to ignore the political impact of slave resistance. Quite the reverse: recent studies of Civil War causation have deftly explored the relationship between slave agency and sectional antagonism, revealing that slave resistance provoked conflict between whites, even in situations where racial justice was not the main point of contention. Northern sectionalism was a reaction against proslavery belligerence, which was fueled by internal conflicts in the South. Narratives of Civil War causation that focus on white northerners' fears for their liberties depend on slave agency, for the aggressiveness of the slave power was, essentially, a response to the power of slaves. 30

Revealingly, recent works by John Ashworth and William W. Freehling both stress this theme. Both scholars published long-awaited second volumes of their accounts of Civil War causation in 2007. Beyond this coincidence, however, it would be difficult to find two historians more dissimilar than Ashworth, a Marxist who privileges labor systems and class relations, and Freehling, a master storyteller who stresses contingency and individual consciousness. For all their methodological and ideological differences, however, Ashworth and Freehling concur on an essential point: the struggle between masters and slaves accelerated the sectional conflict by forcing masters to support undemocratic policies that threatened northern liberties. The resulting hostility of northerners toward slaveholders provoked a fierce response, and the cycle continued. By weaving the day-to-day contest between masters and slaves into their political analyses, both authors fashion a “reintegrated” American history that blends the insights of social and political history. 31

According to Ashworth, class conflict forced ruling elites in both sections to pursue clashing political and economic policies. Thus, structural divergence in social and economic systems between North and South inflamed the political and ideological strife that resulted in disunion. Class conflict was especially problematic in the South, whose enslaved population did not accept proslavery principles in the same way that, by the 1850s, some northern workers embraced free-labor ideology. Instead, interminable slave resistance compelled southern masters to gag congressional debate over slavery, to demand stringent fugitive slave laws, and to agitate for a territorial slave code—in short, to act the part of an authoritarian slave power. “Behind every event in the history of the sectional controversy,” Ashworth argues in his first volume, “lurked the consequences of black resistance to slavery.” A dozen years of additional work confirmed this thesis. In his second volume, Ashworth contends that “the opposition of the slaves to their own enslavement is the fundamental, irreplaceable cause of the War.” The Civil War did not begin as a massive slave rebellion because southern masters managed to contain the unrest that threatened their rule, but the price of this success was a deteriorating relationship with northerners. By contending for their freedom, slaves obliged their masters to behave in ways that convinced even the most bigoted northern whites that slavery menaced their own liberties. 32

colliding democratic and despotic governing systems. The Old South combined dictatorship over blacks with republicanism for whites, supposedly cleanly severed by an All-Mighty Color Line. But to preserve dictatorial dominion over blacks, the slaveholding minority sometimes trenched on majoritarian government for whites, in the nation as well as in their section. … Northerners called the militant slavocracy the Slave Power, meaning that those with autocratic power over blacks also deployed undemocratic power over whites. Most Yankees hardly embraced blacks or abolitionists. Yet racist Northerners would fight the Slave Power to the death to preserve their white men's majoritarian rights.

Scholars who foreground northern concern for white liberty in a slaveholding republic underline the importance of class conflict between northern voters and southern elites in the coming of the Civil War. Moderate antislavery northerners condemned slaveholders for aristocratic pretensions and tyrannical policies, not for racial bigotry. But for many scholars, race remains the key to understanding antebellum sectional politics. The tendency remains strong to frame the sectional conflict and the Civil War as one campaign in a longer struggle for racial justice. Not surprisingly, studies of radical abolitionism are the most likely works to employ this framework. Radical abolitionists nurtured a strikingly egalitarian conception of race and fought for a social vision that most scholars share but one that the modern world has not yet realized, and therein lies their appeal. Moreover, those who foreground race in the coming of the war do not naïvely suggest that all northern whites were racial egalitarians. Since the 1960s, commitment to an admirable antiracist ideal, not wishful thinking, has given a powerful boost to a primarily racial interpretation of the sectional conflict. But the recent scholarly emphasis on issues of class and the slave power suggests that framing the sectional conflict as a clash over racial injustice is not the most useful approach to understanding Civil War causation. 34

The slave power was defined not by racism but by slaveholders' capacity to use federal law and muscle to advance their class interests. Proslavery racism was, like all racism, reprehensible, but it is easily, even when subtly, overstated in accounts of Civil War causation. It is, for example, hardly incorrect to refer to the proslavery ideologue James Henry Hammond as “a fiercely racist South Carolina politician,” but that characterization emphasizes a trait he shared with most northern voters rather than what alienated Hammond from them and thus hastened the rise of the Republican party and the outbreak of war. What distinguished Hammond from his northern antagonists was his “mudsill” theory of society (which he outlined in an 1858 Senate speech) and its implications for American class relations. Proceeding from the presumption that every functioning society must rest upon the labors of a degraded “mudsill” class, Hammond argued that the southern laboring class, because it was enslaved, was materially better off and politically less threatening than its northern counterpart. Hammond's highly public articulation of this theory outraged proponents of free labor and made him a particularly notorious proslavery propagandist. Illinois Republicans who rallied under a banner declaring “Small-Fisted Farmers, Mud Sills of Society, Greasy Mechanics, for A. Lincoln” recognized the deep-seated class dimensions of their party's conflict with Hammond and his ilk. Moreover, Hammond's comparison of the northern and southern working classes suggests a curious ambiguity in the relative importance of class and race in proslavery ideology. This subject demands further scholarly attention, but important advances have recently been made. On the one hand, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese have indicated that the irascible George Fitzhugh, who proclaimed that working people of all colors would be better off as slaves, was not alone in developing a defense of slavery compatible with racism but ultimately based on class relations. On the other hand, slaveholders, at least as much as any other antebellum Americans, benefited from portraying slavery as a fundamentally racial issue. As Frank Towers has shown, planters feared the day when nonslaveholding southern whites might begin to think in terms of class and shuddered at the prospect of working-class politics in southern cities. That one of the most strident articulations of the race-based proslavery argument—which promised that the subjugation of blacks made equals of all white men—appeared in 1860 was no coincidence, as southern elites sought to ensure regional white unity on the eve of a possible revolution. In pursuit of their interests, southern ideologues drew on both class- and race-based arguments, and if the latter stand out to modern readers, the former did more to alienate individuals in the free states. Slaveholders' conflict with northern voters, the collision that triggered secession and war, grew not out of clashing racial views but out of competition for political power. 35

The most broadly appealing brands of antislavery defined this competition as one between classes. Proponents of popular antislavery presented sectional issues in terms of class more often than race, and with tremendous effect. Their interpretation of sectional friction generated mass sympathy for a cause that otherwise would have remained a fringe movement. This moderate antislavery ideology is easily discounted if we attribute genuine antislavery sentiments only to those few northerners uncontaminated by racism. It grew from many sources: Jacksonian antipathy to concentrated economic and political power; an often-radical producerism that would guarantee to the worker the fruits of his labor; a demand for land reform that would reserve western soil for white farmers; and a morally charged concern about the fate of democracy in a nation dominated by slaveholders. Class-based Jacksonian radicalism thus informed the ideology of the Free Soil party and, crucially, the Republicans. Antislavery politicians such as New Hampshire's John P. Hale, a Democrat who drifted into the Republican ranks via the Free Soil party, “defined the controversy over slavery and its continuation as an issue between aristocratic slave owners and ‘sturdy republicans’ rather than between innocent slaves and sinful masters,” points out Jonathan H. Earle. It was this contest that aroused a northern majority to vote Lincoln into office and to enlist in the Union army. The issues of money, power, class, and democracy that concerned Jacksonian and other moderate antislavery northerners were not less morally charged because they focused on white liberty and equality in a republic. Nor should we forget that this class-based antislavery critique contained the seeds of a racial egalitarianism that sprouted, however feebly, during the Civil War. The experience of war often turned whites-only egalitarianism into a far more sweeping notion of human equality. To ignore this transformation is to discount the radicalizing influence that the Civil War had on many northern soldiers and civilians. 36

When coupled with an analysis of southern politics that emphasizes slave agency, this revival of scholarly interest in popular antislavery ideology offers not only a convincing interpretation of Civil War causation but also a politically and pedagogically important narrative about class and politics in American history. Adam Rothman's 2005 essay on the slave power is a model of this fresh and constructive approach. On one level, he presents an accessible introduction to the history and historiography of nineteenth-century slaveholders. But the chief contribution of the work lies in the context in which the essay was published: an anthology on American elite classes, from early national merchant capitalists to postwar anti–New Dealers, and their relationship with American democracy. Casting the slave power in this light gives the sectional conflict a bold new meaning, one that reveals the Civil War to have been both much more than and much less than a precursor to the civil rights movement. It appears as a struggle between (an imperfect) popular democracy and one of the most powerful and deeply rooted interests in antebellum politics. One might argue that Americans simply replaced one set of masters—southern planters—with another, the rising robber barons. Nevertheless, the Civil War offers one of precious few instances in American history in which a potent, entrenched, incredibly wealthy, and constitutionally privileged elite class was thoroughly ousted from national power. This makes the class-based issues that helped spark the war too important to forget. 37

That narrative may also aid in the quest for that holy grail of academic history: a receptive public audience. The neo-Confederate outcry against the alleged anti-southern bias of McPherson's 2000 “What Caused the Civil War?” essay and the ongoing controversy over the Confederate flag indicate that much of the public does not share in the scholarly consensus on slavery's central place in Civil War causation. Unfortunately, no quick fix exists for popular misconceptions about the war, but scholarship that frames the conflict over slavery as a struggle in which the liberties of all Americans were at stake may influence minds closed to depictions of the war as an antiracist crusade. This is not to argue that historians should pander to popular prejudice or that race is not a central theme in the history of the Civil War era. Rather, historians can and should capitalize on the political and pedagogical advantages of an important body of scholarship that sharpens our understanding of Civil War causation by explaining why even incorrigible northern racists voted and fought against southern slaveholders, and that reminds us that slavery impacted all antebellum Americans, North and South, black and white. When northerners urged the “necessity” of defending their liberty against the encroaching “tyranny” of a government “under the absolute control of an oligarchy of southern slave holders,” as Judge F. C. White of Utica, New York, wrote in 1858, they meant precisely what they said. To gainsay the salience of race in the causes, course, and outcome of the Civil War would be a terrible mistake, but it would be equally misleading to neglect the matters of class, power, and democracy at the heart of the slavery debate; these issues contributed mightily to the origins of the nation's bloodiest conflict and to its modern-day significance. 38

Whatever its ultimate fate in the classroom and public discourse, recent scholarship on the coming of the Civil War reveals an impatience with old interpretive categories, an eagerness to challenge the basic parameters that have long guided scholarly thinking on the topic, and a healthy skepticism of narratives that explain the war with comforting, simplistic formulae. The broad consensus on slavery's centrality has not stifled rapid growth and diversification in the field. Indeed, the proliferation of works on Civil War causation presents a serious challenge to anyone seeking to synthesize the recent literature into a single tidy interpretation. Rather than suggest an all-encompassing model, this essay has outlined three broad themes that could provide fertile ground for future debate. A reaction against the expanding geographic and temporal breadth of Civil War causation studies, for example, might prompt scholars to return to tightly focused, state-level analyses of antebellum politics. Recent political histories of antebellum Mississippi and Louisiana suggest that this approach has much to contribute to our understanding of how national debates filtered down to state and local levels. Other scholars might take an explicitly comparative approach and analyze the causes, course, and results of the American Civil War alongside those of roughly contemporaneous intrastate conflicts, including the Reform War (1857–1861) in Mexico and China's Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864). Comparative history's vast potential has been amply demonstrated by Enrico Dal Lago's study of agrarian elites and regionalism in the Old South and Italy, and by Don H. Doyle's edited collection on secession movements around the globe. Similarly, scholars undoubtedly will challenge the interpretive emphases on proslavery American nationalism, antislavery northern sectionalism, and the class dimensions of the sectional conflict that pervade much of the recent scholarship and receive close attention in this essay. But others might carry on this work by studying phenomena such as the disunionist thrust of radical abolitionism. The campaign for free-state secession never sank deep roots in northern soil. But by the late 1850s it was a frequent topic of editorials in abolitionist publications such as the National Anti-Slavery Standard, and it captured mainstream headlines through events such as the 1857 Worcester Disunion Convention. And even if race, southern sectionalism, and northern Unionism dominate future narratives of Civil War causation, further debate will sharpen our analysis of an easily mythologized period of American history. 39

These debates will be no less meaningful because of scholars' near-universal acknowledgement of the centrality of slavery in the coming of the Civil War. Instead, they illustrate C. Vann Woodward's observation that “most of the important debates over history … have not been about absolute but about relative matters, not about the existence but about the degree or extent of the phenomenon in question.” Beneath a veneer of consensus lies interpretive nuance and healthy disagreement, which we can hope will inform both academic and popular commemoration of the Civil War sesquicentennial. 40

The title of this article borrows from Howard K. Beale, “What Historians Have Said about the Causes of the Civil War,” Social Science Research Bulletin, 54 (1946), 53–102. Abraham Lincoln, “Second Inaugural Address,” in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler (9 vols., New Brunswick, 1953–1955), VIII, 332–33; James M. McPherson, “What Caused the Civil War?,” North and South, 4 (Nov. 2000), 12–22, esp. 13. This consensus extends into college textbooks, many written by James McPherson, which “contain little debate over war causation since they recognize that slavery was the root cause of the war.” See William B. Rogers and Terese Martyn, “A Consensus at Last: American Civil War Texts and the Topics That Dominate the College Classroom,” History Teacher, 41 (Aug. 2008), 519–30, esp. 530. See also Aaron Charles Sheehan-Dean, “A Book for Every Perspective: Current Civil War and Reconstruction Textbooks,” Civil War History, 51 (Sept. 2005), 317–24. Charles W. Joyner, “The Flag Controversy and the Causes of the Civil War: A Statement by Historians,” Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, 24 (Winter 2001), 196–98, esp. 197. For lengthier exposés of slavery, secession, and postbellum mythmaking from recent years, see Charles B. Dew, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (Charlottesville, 2001); and James W. Loewen and Edward H. Sebesta, eds., The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader: The “Great Truth” about the “Lost Cause” (Jackson, 2010).

Elizabeth R. Varon, Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859 (Chapel Hill, 2008), 4. Edward L. Ayers, What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History (New York, 2005), 128. For Edward Ayers's call for reinvigorated debate on the causes, conduct, and consequences of the Civil War, see ibid. , 131–44.

For analyses of earlier literature, see Beale, “What Historians Have Said about the Causes of the Civil War”; Thomas J. Pressly, Americans Interpret Their Civil War (New York, 1962); David M. Potter, “The Literature on the Background of the Civil War,” in The South and the Sectional Conflict, by David M. Potter (Baton Rouge, 1968), 87–150; and Eric Foner, “The Causes of the American Civil War: Recent Interpretations and New Directions,” Civil War History, 20 (Sept. 1974), 197–214. For more recent historiographical assessments of specific topics related to the sectional crisis, see Lacy K. Ford, ed., A Companion to the Civil War and Reconstruction (Malden, 2005), 25–200. For a reinterpretation of the full century and a half of scholarship on Civil War causation that briefly samples recent literature, see Frank Towers, “Partisans, New History, and Modernization: The Historiography of the Civil War's Causes, 1861–2011,” Journal of the Civil War Era, 1 (June 2011), 237–64. Several important bodies of literature are underrepresented in my historiography. One is work on the five months between Abraham Lincoln's election and the bombardment of Fort Sumter, which addresses the question of why and how secession sparked a shooting war. This outcome was not inevitable, because the causes of disunion were not identical to the causes of the Civil War itself. This essay focuses on the former topic. For recent interpretations of the latter, see Dew, Apostles of Disunion; David Detzer, Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War (New York, 2001); Larry D. Mansch, Abraham Lincoln, President-Elect: The Four Critical Months from Election to Inauguration (Jefferson, 2005); Nelson D. Lankford, Cry Havoc! The Crooked Road to Civil War, 1861 (New York, 2007); Russell McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession (Chapel Hill, 2008); Harold Holzer, Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter, 1860–1861 (New York, 2008); Lawrence M. Denton, William Henry Seward and the Secession Crisis: The Effort to Prevent Civil War (Jefferson, 2009); William J. Cooper Jr., “The Critical Signpost on the Journey toward Secession,” Journal of Southern History, 77 (Feb. 2011), 3–16; Emory M. Thomas, The Dogs of War, 1861 (New York, 2011); and Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening (New York, 2011). Biographies are also not explored systematically here. Recent biographies related to the coming of the Civil War include William C. Davis, Rhett: The Turbulent Life and Times of a Fire-Eater (Columbia, S.C., 2001); John L. Myers, Henry Wilson and the Coming of the Civil War (Lanham, 2005); John M. Belohlavek, Broken Glass: Caleb Cushing and the Shattering of the Union (Kent, 2005); Eric H. Walther, William Lowndes Yancey and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2006); and Denton, William Henry Seward and the Secession Crisis . Thanks in part to the close proximity of Lincoln's bicentennial birthday and the Civil War sesquicentennial, scholarship on the sixteenth president continues to burgeon. For analyses of this vast literature, see James Oakes, “Lincoln and His Commas,” Civil War History, 54 (June 2008), 176–93; Sean Wilentz, “Who Lincoln Was,” New Republic, July 15, 2009, pp. 24–47; and Nicole Etcheson, “Abraham Lincoln and the Nation's Greatest Quarrel: A Review Essay,” Journal of Southern History, 76 (May 2010), 401–16. For an account of Lincoln historiography in the Journal of American History, see Allen C. Guelzo, “The Not-So-Grand Review: Abraham Lincoln in the Journal of American History, ” Journal of American History, 96 (Sept. 2009), 400–416. That biography and studies of the secession winter are thriving suggests a possible waning of the long-dominant “irrepressible conflict” interpretation, as both approaches emphasize contingency and individual agency. Collective biography, particularly on Lincoln's relationships with other key figures, has also flourished. On Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, see James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (New York, 2007); Paul Kendrick and Stephen Kendrick, Douglass and Lincoln: How a Revolutionary Black Leader and a Reluctant Liberator Struggled to End Slavery and Save the Union (New York, 2008); and John Stauffer, Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (New York, 2008). On Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, see Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America (New York, 2008); and Roy Morris, The Long Pursuit: Abraham Lincoln's Thirty-Year Struggle with Stephen Douglas for the Heart and Soul of America (New York, 2008). A third body of literature that needs further historiographical analysis relates to gender and the coming of the Civil War. See, for example, Michael D. Pierson, Free Hearts and Free Homes: Gender and American Antislavery Politics (Chapel Hill, 2003); Nina Silber, Gender and the Sectional Conflict (Chapel Hill, 2008); Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel, Bleeding Borders: Race, Gender, and Violence in Pre–Civil War Kansas (Baton Rouge, 2009); and Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, Mass., 2010). For discussions of the classic schools of scholarship, see Kenneth M. Stampp, “The Irrepressible Conflict,” in The Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the Civil War, by Kenneth M. Stampp (New York, 1980), 191–245; Ayers, What Caused the Civil War?, 132–33; and Gary J. Kornblith, “Rethinking the Coming of the Civil War: A Counterfactual Exercise,” Journal of American History, 90 (June 2003), 78–79. For a call for a synthesis of the fundamentalist and revisionist interpretations, see Ayers, What Caused the Civil War? On the continued relevance of these camps, see James Huston, “Interpreting the Causation Sequence: The Meaning of the Events Leading to the Civil War,” Reviews in American History, 34 (Sept. 2006), 329. The coming of the Civil War has long shaped discussions of historical causation, including Lee Benson and Cushing Strout, “Causation and the American Civil War: Two Appraisals,” History and Theory, 1 (no. 2, 1961), 163–85; and William Dray and Newton Garver, “Some Causal Accounts of the American Civil War,” Daedalus, 91 (Summer 1962), 578–98.

Key works on the transnational turn include “Toward the Internationalization of American History: A Round Table,” Journal of American History, 79 (Sept. 1992), 432–542; Carl J. Guarneri, “Internationalizing the United States Survey Course: American History for a Global Age,” History Teacher, 36 (Nov. 2002), 37–64; Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, 2002); Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America's Place in World History (New York, 2006); and Ian Tyrrell, Transnational Nation: United States History in Global Perspective since 1789 (Basingstoke, 2007). Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union (2 vols., New York, 1947), I, 3–5; James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York, 1988), 3–5; David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, completed and ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York, 1976), 1–6. On continental expansion and sectional conflict, see Michael A. Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 1997). On the divisive influence of sectionalized fantasies of tropical conquest, see Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854–1861 (Baton Rouge, 1973). For an early work on Haiti's transnational significance, see Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge, 1988). On the relationship between the Ostend Manifesto and domestic politics, see Robert E. May, “A ‘Southern Strategy’ for the 1850s: Northern Democrats, the Tropics, and Expansion of the National Domain,” Louisiana Studies, 14 (Winter 1975), 333–59, esp. 337–42; and John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, vol. II: The Coming of the Civil War, 1850–1861 (New York, 2007), 395–98.

Edward Bartlett Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, 2008), 7; Matthew J. Clavin, Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution (Philadelphia, 2010), 5. Other recent transnational studies of Civil War causation include Timothy Roberts, “The European Revolutions of 1848 and Antebellum Violence in Kansas,” Journal of the West, 44 (Fall 2005), 58–68; Gerald Horne, The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade (New York, 2007); McCurry, Confederate Reckoning; and Mischa Honeck, We Are the Revolutionists: German-Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists after 1848 (Athens, Ga., 2011). Several recent dissertations explore the equally permeable boundary between North and South. See Joseph T. Rainer, “The Honorable Fraternity of Moving Merchants: Yankee Peddlers in the Old South, 1800–1860” (Ph.D. diss., College of William and Mary, 2000); Wesley Brian Borucki, “Yankees in King Cotton's Court: Northerners in Antebellum and Wartime Alabama” (Ph.D. diss., University of Alabama, 2002); Eric William Plaag, “Strangers in a Strange Land: Northern Travelers and the Coming of the American Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., University of South Carolina, 2006); and Alana K. Bevan, “‘We Are the Same People’: The Leverich Family of New York and Their Antebellum American Inter-regional Network of Elites” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2009). On the “mighty experiment,” see Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (New York, 2002). The compelling scholarship on global antislavery undoubtedly encouraged the internationalization of Civil War causation studies. David Brion Davis's contributions remain indispensable. See David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, 1966); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770 –1823 (Ithaca, 1975); and David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York, 2006). For a work that places antebellum southern thought, including proslavery ideology, into an international context, see Michael O'Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life in the American South, 1810–1860 (2 vols., Chapel Hill, 2004).

Rugemer, Problem of Emancipation, 6–7; Clavin, Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War, 9–10.

Brian Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (Baltimore, 2009), 10; Nicholas Onuf and Peter Onuf, Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War (Charlottesville, 2006). John Majewski offers a different perspective on slavery and free trade, acknowledging that slaveholders were hardly united in favor of protection and arguing that the moderate Confederate tariff represented a compromise between protectionists and free traders. See John Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation (Chapel Hill, 2009).

On the centrality of cotton exports in the economic history of the South—and the United States—see Douglass C. North, The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860 (Englewood Cliffs, 1961). On the Old South's place in world economic history and its dependency on the global cotton market, see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, “The Slave Economies in Political Perspective,” in Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism, by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese (New York, 1983), 34–60. On the cotton trade and Confederate diplomacy, see Frank Lawrence Owsley Sr., King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America (Chicago, 1931). On the early history of the cotton kingdom, see Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, Mass., 2005).

Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes, April 22, 1820, Library of Congress: Thomas Jefferson, http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/159.html . The foundational text for “long movement” scholarship is Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History, 91 (March 2005), 1233–63. An influential application of this paradigm is Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York, 2008). For a sharp critique of the long movement concept, see Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang, “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies,” Journal of African American History, 92 (Spring 2007), 265–88. Matthew Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, 2006), 5.

John Craig Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West (Charlottesville, 2007). For an accessible introduction to the early struggles over slavery, see Gary J. Kornblith, Slavery and Sectional Strife in the Early American Republic, 1776–1821 (Lanham, 2010). On slavery's post-Revolution expansion, see Rothman, Slave Country . For the social and intellectual history of early proslavery thought, see Jeffrey Robert Young, ed., Proslavery and Sectional Thought in the Early South, 1740–1829: An Anthology (Columbia, S.C., 2006); Charles F. Irons, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill, 2008); and Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York, 2009).

Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860 (Baton Rouge, 2000), 28–51; Jan Lewis, “The Three-Fifths Clause and the Origins of Sectionalism,” in Congress and the Emergence of Sectionalism: From the Missouri Compromise to the Age of Jackson, ed. Paul Finkelman and Donald R. Kennon (Athens, Ohio, 2008), 19–46; David L. Lightner, Slavery and the Commerce Power: How the Struggle against the Interstate Slave Trade Led to the Civil War (New Haven, 2006); Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill, 2002); Christopher Childers, “Interpreting Popular Sovereignty: A Historiographical Essay,” Civil War History, 57 (March 2011), 48–70. For a discussion of the temporal parameters of his own work, see William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, vol. I: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (New York, 1990), vii.

Paul Calore, The Causes of the Civil War: The Political, Cultural, Economic, and Territorial Disputes between North and South (Jefferson, 2008). John B. Alley, Speech of Hon. John B. Alley, of Mass., on the Principles and Purposes of the Republican Party: Delivered in the House of Representatives of the United States, Monday, April 30, 1860 (Washington, 1860), 2; Robert Toombs, Speech of Hon. Robert Toombs, on the Crisis. Delivered before the Georgia Legislature, December 7, 1860 (Washington, 1860), 5. Emphasis in original. Clavin, Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War; Schoen, Fragile Fabric of Union, 99; Margot Minardi, Making Slavery History: Abolitionism and the Politics of Memory in Massachusetts (New York, 2010). On the memory of the American Revolution in William Lloyd Garrison's proudly anachronistic rhetoric, see Robert Fanuzzi, Abolition's Public Sphere (Minneapolis, 2003). On abolitionists' use of public commemorations of British emancipation to recruit new activists, see Julie Roy Jeffrey, “‘No Occurrence in Human History Is More Deserving of Commemoration Than This’: Abolitionist Celebrations of Freedom,” in Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism, ed. Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer (New York, 2006), 200–219. On the link between collective memory of the Texas Revolution and the growth of Confederate nationalism in Texas, see Andrew F. Lang, “Memory, the Texas Revolution, and Secession: The Birth of Confederate Nationalism in the Lone Star State,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 114 (July 2010), 21–36. On the memory of the Civil War, see, for example, David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); William Alan Blair, Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865–1914 (Chapel Hill, 2004); Alice Fahs and Joan Waugh, eds., The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture (Chapel Hill, 2004); and Gary W. Gallagher, Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2008).

Varon, Disunion!, 5, 17, 317–22, esp. 17, 5. Emphasis in original.

Robert Pierce Forbes, The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America (Chapel Hill, 2007), 3. Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic, 211.

Michael S. Green, Politics and America in Crisis: The Coming of the Civil War (Santa Barbara, 2010), 17–18. For recent studies of the slavery expansion issue in the late 1840s and early 1850s, see Joel H. Silbey, Storm over Texas: The Annexation Controversy and the Road to Civil War (New York, 2005); Leonard L. Richards, The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 2007); John C. Waugh, On the Brink of Civil War: The Compromise of 1850 and How It Changed the Course of American History (Wilmington, 2003); Robert V. Remini, At the Edge of the Precipice: Henry Clay and the Compromise That Saved the Union (New York, 2010); and Steven E. Woodworth, Manifest Destinies: America's Westward Expansion and the Road to the Civil War (New York, 2010). Also in the late 1840s, antislavery activists shifted away from efforts to abolish the interstate slave trade and toward the restriction of slavery's expansion. See Lightner, Slavery and the Commerce Power, 113–39. General histories that begin in the 1845–1850 period include Arthur Charles Cole, The Irrepressible Conflict, 1850–1865 (New York, 1934); Nevins, Ordeal of the Union; Potter, Impending Crisis; Ludwell H. Johnson, Division and Reunion: America, 1848–1877 (New York, 1978); McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom; Richard H. Sewell, A House Divided: Sectionalism and Civil War, 1848–1865 (Baltimore, 1988); Robert Cook, Civil War America: Making a Nation, 1848–1877 (London, 2003); and Green, Politics and America in Crisis .

Ritchie Devon Watson Jr., Normans and Saxons: Southern Race Mythology and the Intellectual History of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, 2008), 28. Susan-Mary Grant, North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (Lawrence, 2000), 61–80; Marc Egnal, Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War (New York, 2009), 21–122. For accessible accounts of the Compromise of 1850, see Waugh, On the Brink of Civil War; and Remini, At the Edge of the Precipice.

Green, Politics and America in Crisis, 41. On the ages of representatives and senators in 1850, see Holman Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict: The Crisis and Compromise of 1850 (New York, 1964), 32, 40. On the deaths of John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster, and Henry Clay, see Merrill D. Peterson, The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (New York, 1987), 494. “Address, 1851, of the Southern Rights Association of the University of Virginia to the Young Men of the South” [Dec. 19, 1850?], folder 1, box 1, William Henry Gist Papers (South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia).

The classic statement of this “revisionist” interpretation is J. G. Randall, “The Blundering Generation,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 27 (June 1940), 3–28. For a different psychological interpretation of generational influences on politics, see George B. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (New York, 1979). For a generational analysis of the rise of immediate abolitionism around 1830, see James L. Huston, “The Experiential Basis of the Northern Antislavery Impulse,” Journal of Southern History, 56 (Nov. 1990), 633–35. Peter S. Carmichael, The Last Generation: Young Virginians in Peace, War, and Reunion (Chapel Hill, 2005). Earlier works that emphasize secession's popularity among youthful southern whites include William L. Barney, The Secessionist Impulse: Alabama and Mississippi in 1860 (Princeton, 1974); and Henry James Walker, “Henry Clayton and the Secession Movement in Alabama,” Southern Studies, 4 (Winter 1993), 341–60. Stephen W. Berry II, All That Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South (New York, 2003); Jon Grinspan, “‘Young Men for War’: The Wide Awakes and Lincoln's 1860 Presidential Campaign,” Journal of American History, 96 (Sept. 2009), 357–78.

David M. Potter, “The Historian's Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa,” in South and the Sectional Conflict, by Potter, 34–83, esp. 75, 65.

Grant, North over South, 6; Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic, 42–74. See also Kevin M. Gannon, “Calculating the Value of Union: States' Rights, Nullification, and Secession in the North, 1800–1848” (Ph.D. diss., University of South Carolina, 2002).

Robert E. Bonner, Mastering America: Southern Slaveholders and the Crisis of American Nationhood (New York, 2009), xv, 84, 217. On slaveholders' influence over national policy and their use of federal power to advance proslavery interests, see Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government's Relations to Slavery, completed and ed. Ward M. McAfee (New York, 2001); Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago, 2006); and George William Van Cleve, A Slaveholders' Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early Republic (Chicago, 2010). For a work that argues that the slave power thesis was not mere paranoia and disputes the dismissive interpretation of earlier historians, see Richards, Slave Power . Works that Leonard Richards disputes include Chauncey S. Boucher, “ In re That Aggressive Slavocracy,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 8 (June–Sept. 1921), 13–79; and David Brion Davis, The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (Baton Rouge, 1970). The painful shift from proslavery American nationalism to proslavery southern nationalism can be traced in the career of the Alabama Whig Henry Washington Hilliard. See David I. Durham, A Southern Moderate in Radical Times: Henry Washington Hilliard, 1808–1892 (Baton Rouge, 2008).

Matthew J. Karp, “Slavery and American Sea Power: The Navalist Impulse in the Antebellum South,” Journal of Southern History, 77 (May 2011), 283–324, esp. 290; Schoen, Fragile Fabric of Union, 197–259; James L. Huston, Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2003).

Shearer Davis Bowman, At the Precipice: Americans North and South during the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill, 2010), 12. Margaret Abruzzo, Polemical Pain: Slavery, Cruelty, and the Rise of Humanitarianism (Baltimore, 2011); John Patrick Daly, When Slavery Was Called Freedom: Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War (Lexington, Ky., 2002); Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill, 2006); Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York, 2005), esp. xxii, 576, 791; Diane N. Capitani, Truthful Pictures: Slavery Ordained by God in the Domestic Sentimental Novel of the Nineteenth-Century South (Lanham, 2009). On the antidemocratic impulse behind secession in South Carolina and, ostensibly, the rest of the Confederacy, see Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill, 2000). See also Patricia Roberts-Miller, Fanatical Schemes: Proslavery Rhetoric and the Tragedy of Consensus (Tuscaloosa, 2009). On the southern rejection of bourgeois liberalism and capitalism, see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview (New York, 2005); and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, Slavery in White and Black: Class and Race in the Southern Slaveholders' New World Order (New York, 2008). For the argument that both sections were equally dedicated to liberalism, see David F. Ericson, The Debate over Slavery: Antislavery and Proslavery Liberalism in Antebellum America (New York, 2000). For a compelling argument that secession stemmed from a fierce reaction against nineteenth-century liberal trends and from fealty to the true American republic, see McCurry, Confederate Reckoning, 12–13. Francis W. Pickens to Benjamin F. Perry, June 27, 1857, folder 3, box 1, B. F. Perry Papers (Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill). Emphasis in original.

On the fragility of an antebellum nationalism built on ideals that developed clashing sectional characteristics, see Melinda Lawson, Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North (Lawrence, 2002), 8–9.

This work expands on a theme advanced in Russel B. Nye, Fettered Freedom: Civil Liberties and the Slavery Controversy, 1830–1860 (1949; East Lansing, 1964). Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York, 2010), 120.

Larry Gara, “Slavery and the Slave Power: A Crucial Distinction,” Civil War History, 15 (March 1969), 5–18, esp. 9, 6.

On the difficulty of placing antislavery activists on a spectrum of political opinion, see Frederick J. Blue, No Taint of Compromise: Crusaders in Antislavery Politics (Baton Rouge, 2005), 265.

Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (Lawrence, 2004), 8; Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic, 5; McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision for War, 26–28. On the importance of “the Union”—antebellum shorthand for an experiment in democratic self-government freighted with world-historical significance—in arousing the northern war effort, see Gary W. Gallagher, The Union War (Cambridge, Mass., 2011). Carol Lasser, “Voyeuristic Abolitionism: Sex, Gender, and the Transformation of Antislavery Rhetoric,” Journal of the Early Republic, 28 (Spring 2008), 113, 112.

Earl M. Maltz, Fugitive Slave on Trial: The Anthony Burns Case and Abolitionist Outrage (Lawrence, 2010), 54. Steven Lubet, Fugitive Justice: Runaways, Rescuers, and Slavery on Trial (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), 44. The white defendants Steven Lubet examines are Castner Hanway, charged with treason for his involvement in an 1851 Christiana, Pennsylvania, clash, and Simeon Bushnell, a participant in an 1858 Oberlin, Ohio, slave rescue. The third case Lubet looks at is that of the fugitive slave Anthony Burns. H. Robert Baker, The Rescue of Joshua Glover: A Fugitive Slave, the Constitution, and the Coming of the Civil War (Athens, Ohio, 2006); Ruby West Jackson and Walter T. McDonald, Finding Freedom: The Untold Story of Joshua Glover, Runaway Slave (Madison, 2007).

Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2010). On fugitive slaves and national politics, see R. J. M. Blackett, “Dispossessing Massa: Fugitive Slaves and the Politics of Slavery after 1850,” American Nineteenth Century History, 10 (June 2009), 119–36.

John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, vol. I: Commerce and Compromise, 1820–1850 (New York, 1995); Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, II; William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, vol. II: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854–1961 (New York, 2007). For an exploration of their differences, see John Ashworth, “William W. Freehling and the Politics of the Old South,” American Nineteenth Century History, 5 (Spring 2004), 1–29. On the “reintegration” of political and social history, see William W. Freehling, The Reintegration of American History: Slavery and the Civil War (New York, 1994).

Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, I, 6, II, 1.

Freehling, Road to Disunion, II, xii, xiii. On the relationship between slave resistance and politics in antebellum Virginia, see William A. Link, Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill, 2003). On the political consequences of mass panic over suspected slave revolts in 1860, see Donald E. Reynolds, Texas Terror: The Slave Insurrection Panic of 1860 and the Secession of the Lower South (Baton Rouge, 2007).

John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York, 2005); Fergus M. Bordewich, Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America's First Civil Rights Movement (New York, 2006); James Brewer Stewart, Abolitionist Politics and the Coming of the Civil War (Amherst, 2008); Ford Risley, Abolition and the Press: The Moral Struggle against Slavery (Evanston, 2008).

Varon, Disunion!, 103. Elizabeth Varon mentions the speech but not its impact on northern workers. See ibid ., 308–10. For the class implications of James Henry Hammond's theory, see Samantha Maziarz, “Mudsill Theory,” in Class in America: An Encyclopedia, ed. Robert E. Weir (3 vols., Westport, 2007), II, 549–50. On northerners' response to the speech, see Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge, 1982), 347. On the Republican banner, see McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 196–98. Fox-Genovese and Genovese, Slavery in White and Black . Frank Towers, The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War (Charlottesville, 2004). J. D. B. DeBow, The Interest in Slavery of the Southern Non-slaveholder: The Right of Peaceful Secession; Slavery in the Bible (Charleston, 1860). On elite secessionists' heavy-handed efforts to mobilize nonslaveholding whites behind secession and the only partial success of racist demagoguery, see McCurry, Confederate Reckoning, 38–84.

In his vindication of Jacksonian antislavery, Daniel Feller criticizes the “fixation with race” that leads too many scholars “to question the sincerity or good intentions of any but the most outspoken racial egalitarians among the opponents of slavery.” Daniel Feller, “A Brother in Arms: Benjamin Tappan and the Antislavery Democracy,” Journal of American History, 88 (June 2001), 50. Jonathan H. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854 (Chapel Hill, 2004), 92; Feller, “Brother in Arms”; Suzanne Cooper Guasco, “‘The Deadly Influence of Negro Capitalists’: Southern Yeomen and Resistance to the Expansion of Slavery in Illinois,” Civil War History, 47 (March 2001), 7–29; Sean Wilentz, “Jeffersonian Democracy and the Origins of Political Antislavery in the United States: The Missouri Crisis Revisited,” Journal of the Historical Society, 4 (Sept. 2004), 375–401. Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas, 190–253; Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York, 2007), 12, 221; Mark E. Neely Jr., “Politics Purified: Religion and the Growth of Antislavery Idealism in Republican Ideology during the Civil War,” in The Birth of the Grand Old Party: The Republicans' First Generation, ed. Robert F. Engs and Randall M. Miller (Philadelphia, 2002), 103–27.

Adam Rothman, “The ‘Slave Power’ in the United States, 1783–1865,” in Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 64–91. On the collapse of planters' national power, despite their continued regional dominance, see Steven Hahn, “Class and State in Postemancipation Societies: Southern Planters in Comparative Perspective,” American Historical Review, 95 (Feb. 1990), 75–98.

F. C. White to John P. Hale, Feb. 16, 1858, folder 8, box 12, John P. Hale Papers (New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord). On the response to McPherson's essay, see John M. Coski, “Historians under Fire: The Public and the Memory of the Civil War,” Cultural Resource Management, 25 (no. 4, 2002), 13–15. On the Confederate flag controversy, see J. Michael Martinez, William D. Richardson, and Ron McNinch-Su, eds., Confederate Symbols in the Contemporary South (Gainesville, 2000); K. Michael Prince, Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys! South Carolina and the Confederate Flag (Columbia, S.C., 2004); and John M. Coski, The Confederate Battle Flag: America's Most Embattled Emblem (Cambridge, Mass., 2005).

Christopher J. Olsen, Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi: Masculinity, Honor, and the Antiparty Tradition, 1830–1860 (New York, 2000); John M. Sacher, A Perfect War of Politics: Parties, Politicians, and Democracy in Louisiana, 1824–1861 (Baton Rouge, 2003). Enrico Dal Lago, Agrarian Elites: American Slaveholders and Southern Italian Landowners, 1815–1861 (Baton Rouge, 2005); Don H. Doyle, ed., Secession as an International Phenomenon: From America's Civil War to Contemporary Separatist Movements (Athens, Ga., 2010). On the Worcester Disunion Convention, see Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York, 1995), 140–41; and Ericson, Debate over Slavery, 74–79.

C. Vann Woodward, Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History (Baton Rouge, 1986), 79.

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Was the civil war a “war of choice”.

Collection of the New York Historical Society

David Goldfield, a historian at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, recently penned a column that has appeared in several major newspapers this summer, including the July 22 edition of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. (Link is to fredericksburg.com, where Goldfield’s article first appeared.) http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2012/062012/06242012/707305 In the column, entitled “Give Peace a Chance: Avoid the Carnage of War,” Goldfield bluntly states, “The Civil War was not a just war. It was a war of choice brought on by the insidious mixture of politics and religion that caused our political process and, ultimately, the nation to disintegrate.” As the U.S. commemorates the war’s 150th anniversary with battle reenactments, scholarly lectures, new books, and feature films, the question Goldfield poses is a legitimate one: was the Civil War truly necessary? Obviously, Goldfield believes it was not. His objection to the war stems from his belief that by the year 1861, “the Bible had replaced the Constitution as the arbiter of public policy, particularly over the issue of extending slavery in the Western territories.” The Second Great Awakening had swept across the United States in the early nineteenth century, and the evangelical Protestantism that resulted was a leading cause of the rise of social reform movements, including abolitionism. At the same time, anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant groups emerged as well, eventually resulting in the creation of the so-called “Know Nothing” political party. Evangelicals and Know Nothings sought to spread democracy across North America, and to do so meant that, in Goldfield’s words, “America must expiate its sins, foremost among them slavery and the Roman Catholic Church—two forms of despotism that undermined democracy and Christianity.”

University of California-Davis

Professor Goldfield makes some very compelling points about the ties between early political parties and evangelicals, and such observations are still relevant today. But are these ties the only reasons the nation went to war with itself in April 1861? To argue that they are greatly oversimplifies a century of conflict over the presence of slavery in America. It also seems to place the blame for the war directly at the feet of Republicans like Abraham Lincoln simply because they were Republicans. While Lincoln the politician was deft with his pen and able to incorporate biblical ideas and verses into many of his speeches, Lincoln the man was not an overly devout Christian and was certainly no evangelical. He is also the president that told the South in his March 4, 1861 inaugural address, “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors.” However, according to Goldfield, “When the Republicans, avowedly evangelical and proudly sectional, took control of the government in March 1861, Southerners were rightly concerned to expect the worst. And the worst happened.” The worst did happen, and the war began on April 12, 1861. If one reads Goldfield’s assessment, one might be led to believe that Lincoln ordered the U.S. Army to invade the South as soon as he finished his inaugural speech. In fact, southerners fired on Fort Sumter, a federal bastion in the Charleston, South Carolina harbor. Regardless of how “evangelical” or “sectional” the Republicans were, the South fired the first shot of the war that would last four years and claim approximately 750,000 lives. And for what? Why did the Confederates in Charleston attack Fort Sumter? Why did southerners feel compelled to secede in the first place? In sum, for what did the South fight? Perhaps understanding this will shed light as to whether or not the war was truly necessary.

Library of Congress

Despite former Confederates’ postwar assessments that the South fought merely to defend itself from a tyrannical North or for the always vaguely-defined “states’ rights,” the war was fought primarily because the South wanted no part of a nation that questioned the value, morality, or legality of slavery. When Abraham Lincoln won the election of 1860, southern leaders—despite Lincoln’s constant assurances that he sought only to contain slavery in the South, not abolish it—convinced themselves and their constituents that the so-called “Black Republicans” would soon cross the Potomac and march through the South, freeing slaves and encouraging the twin horrors of black civil rights and miscegenation. Secession movements began in earnest before Lincoln’s election but picked up steam after it was confirmed that Lincoln would become president in 1861. Regardless of how passionately abolitionist they may have been, few northerners had ever openly threatened secession in response to outrages such as slaveholders being elected to the presidency or appointed to the Supreme Court. The South fought to preserve and expand the institution of slavery. While it is true that the majority of Confederate soldiers and sailors were not slave owners, they did fight for a government and a socioeconomic system built on slavery. If a war to preserve the world’s only working democracy and free people from bondage is not necessary or justified, then what war is? “I believe the war will soon take the shape of Slavery and Freedom,” wrote future Union General and President of the United States James A. Garfield just two days after Fort Sumter. “The world will so understand it, and I believe the final outcome will redound to the good of humanity.” Garfield also shared his opinion that “I hope we will never stop short of complete subjugation. Better lose a million men in battle than allow the government to be overthrown.” As further proof of his opinion that the Civil War was a conflict of choice, Goldfield includes this statement: “And what of the former slaves, on whose behalf this carnage was allegedly undertaken? The Civil War sealed their freedom, but little else. It would be more than a century before African-Americans attained the basic rights of that freedom.” True, but does Goldfield actually believe that the failures of the post-war era—which, of course, no one could know or envision before or during the conflict—negate the war’s necessity in the first place? Based on this line of reasoning, African Americans would have been better off to remain as slaves than to be free in an admittedly imperfect and unfriendly atmosphere at war’s end. One wonders how many slaves would have volunteered to stay in bondage had they known how difficult their path to equality under the law would be after the war. Goldfield appears to believe that since the “new birth of freedom” Lincoln spoke of in the Gettysburg Address was not immediate, it was not worth fighting for at all.

National Archives

Finally, Goldfield asks if peace, not war, might have ended slavery sooner and guaranteed the legal and political equality of African Americans. He does not define what he believes “peace” to be. Is it merely the absence of war? Or is there more to it than that? Consider that the North and South argued (relatively) peacefully about the existence, boundaries, and morality of slavery from before the Constitutional Convention until “Bleeding Kansas” in 1856—a period of 70 years. During that time, Congress forged many compromises that appeased both northerners and southerners, but none ever permanently held. Peaceful legislative compromises and solutions were pretty well exhausted by 1856, when pro- and anti-slavery settlers in Kansas brutally fought over whether that territory’s constitution would allow or outlaw slavery. This mini civil war was merely a preview of things to come on a national scale five years later. “Give peace a chance” is a great slogan and a great John Lennon song, but peace merely for the sake of avoiding war was tried for three-quarters of a century before the Civil War. As John Brown—one of the most violent of those who fought on either side in Bleeding Kansas—predicted on his way to the gallows in December 1859, “the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.”

This blog post does not mean to glorify or advocate war. David Goldfield is correct when he writes “Wars are easily made, difficult to end and burdened with unintended consequences and unforeseen human casualties.” As the Union General William T. Sherman told the citizens and leaders of Atlanta in 1864, “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” This quote would help make Goldfield’s case if it ended there. But Sherman continued: “…but you cannot have peace and a division of our country…I want peace, and believe it can only be reached through union and war.”

Perhaps David Goldfield is appalled by war in general and not just the Civil War specifically. If so, few would disagree. Based on his criticisms of the early Republicans’ ties to evangelicalism, he also appears to be repelled by religion. He is certainly not alone in that, either. However, is it possible that he is taking his personal distastes for war and religion in 2012 and using them to oppose the Civil War, which started over 150 years ago?

The United States has unquestionably fought wars during its history for dubious reasons and unclear goals, but the Civil War was not one of them. That war began as a fight to preserve this union, but evolved into a conflict that sought to ensure that union’s liberties and freedoms were and are made available to everyone—thereby making it better by forcing it to live up to the promise of its Constitution. That is worth fighting for.

Written by Todd Arrington, Chief of Interpretation & Education, James A. Garfield National Historic Site August 2012 for the Garfield Observer.

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Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie National Historical Park , James A Garfield National Historic Site

Last updated: October 28, 2020

American Social History Project  ·    Center for Media and Learning

• Background Essay on Why They Fought

This essay explores the motivations of soldiers on both sides of the U.S. Civil War.

For most of the 160 years since the Civil War was fought, what was considered important about ordinary soldiers was that they fought, not what they fought for . In order to promote sectional harmony and reconciliation between North and South after the war, political and social leaders emphasized the valor of soldiers on both sides of the conflict. They chose to remember shared experiences and values like service, military strength, and sacrifice, rather than focusing on the very different political, social, and moral causes for which Civil War soldiers fought. We think, however, that it is critically important to understand why men (and occasionally women) joined their respective armies and engaged in such a long, bloody, and costly conflict. It is clear from soldiers' letters and actions that competing ideas of race, class, and citizenship were central to the conflict. 

One of the enduring questions about soldiers' motivations in the war is  why did so many non-slaveholding white southerners join the Confederate cause ? While it is true that a nascent Southern nationalism played a role for some, understanding the motivations of non-elite white southerners opens a window into mid-nineteenth century ideas about social mobility, class, and race. For white southerners, to get ahead meant to purchase a slave, build up capital, purchase more enslaved people, and to strive towards the economic, social, and political power of the plantation-owning gentry. This is why so many southerners struck out for cheaper lands in newly opened territories, bringing enslaved people and rending enslaved communities in the East, during the 1820s and 1830s; it is why so many supported the war with Mexico in the 1840s and fought bloody conflicts in Kansas in the 1850s. They hoped that new lands would offer new opportunities to get in the slave-holding, plantation-buidling game. This truth about social mobility in the antebellum South, and its dependence on the enslavement of black Americans, explains the quick and fierce loyalty to the Confederate cause on the part of so many poor whites: they fought to preserve slavery in order to preserve their chance to climb the social and economic ladders of their world. Looking at the motivations of white southern soldiers helps students understand the antebellum society they fought to maintain.

When we teach about the motivations of ordinary soldiers, we also see that the North was far from unified in its support for the war. Many disagreed with President Lincoln's aims throughout the conflict—to some he was a tyrant, pushing the nation into a war it did not want, while for others, Lincoln's desire to "preserve the union" did not go far enough in guaranteeing the end of slavery and the citizenship of African Americans. The issuance of the National Conscription Act in 1863 stoked class tensions, as poor and working-class men, many of them immigrants, were drafted into the Union army. Further inflaming tensions was the law's provision that allowed anyone who could pay $300 to avoid military service. In July 1863, violent anti-draft riots broke out in New York City, where a mostly working-class Irish immigrant contingent burned and looted the Colored Orphans Asylum and the draft office, and lynched African Americans. At least a dozen were killed  before the riot was quelled by the arrival of Union troops, weary from their recent battle at Gettysburg. The draft riots underscore that deep divisions of race and class were alive and well in the North, as well as the South, and that the war, rather than solving these problems, exacerbated them.

In  an 1864 letter to Abraham Lincoln , James Shorter, writing on behalf of his fellow soldiers in the 55th Massachusetts regiment, summarized the motivations of many black soldiers: "We came to fight For Liberty justice & Equality" [ sic ]. Although initially denied the opportunity to serve in the Union army, African Americans continually put pressure on government and military leaders to enlist black soldiers. After they were finally allowed to join, more than 200,000 black men signed up. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, refused to accept lower wages than white soldiers were paid. In their letters and acts of protest, black soldiers repeatedly claimed that they were entitled to equal and fair treatment to white soldiers. Further, they affirmed their right to enjoy the full privileges of citizenship because of their shared participation in the military struggle. Black soldiers often pointed out that they did not passively wait for freedom to be granted but, as soldiers, helped to win the war that ended slavery.

In This Collection

Primary documents.

• "Men of Color, To Arms!"
• African-American Victims Describe the New York City Draft Riots

New York City Police Respond to the Draft Riots

• Congress Issues the Conscription Act
• An African-American Soldier Fights "In Defense of My Race and Country"
• An African-American Soldier Asks for Equal Pay
• An African-American Soldier Writes on Behalf of His Fellow Troops
• "Wanted, a Substitute"
• A New York Rioter Explains His Opposition to the Draft
• A Georgia Soldier Condemns the Exemption of Slaveholders
• "Southern 'Volunteers'"
• "Colored Citizens, To Arms!"

Secondary Documents

Background Essay on the New York City Draft Riots

• Background Essay on the "Twenty Negro" Law
• "Why Non-Slaveholders Fought for the Confederacy"

Teaching Activities

The New York City Draft Riots: A Role Play

• "In Defense of My Race and Country": African-American Soldiers on Why They Are Fighting

Who Fought for the Union?

• Who Fought for the Confederacy?

Historical Era

Civil War and Reconstruction (1861-1877)

Slavery and Abolition

African-American Soldiers , Civil War , New York City Draft Riots

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New York City Draft Riots Role Play worksheet

"The Irrepressible Conflict"

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Slavery and the Civil War Essay

Theme essays. diversity, extra credit option. reconstruction, works cited.

During the period of 1820-1860, the life of white and black people in the South depended on developing the Institute of slavery which shaped not only social but also economic life of the region. The Institute of slavery was primarily for the Southern states, and this feature helped to distinguish the South from the other regions of the USA.

Slavery played the key role in shaping the economic and social life of the South because it influenced the trade and economic relations in the region as well as the social and class structure representing slave owners, white farmers without slaves, and slaves as the main labor force in the region.

The development of the South during the period of 1820-1860 was based on growing cotton intensively. To guarantee the enormous exports of cotton, it was necessary to rely on slaves as the main cheap or almost free workforce. The farmers of the South grew different crops, but the economic success was associated with the farms of those planters who lived in the regions with fertile soil and focused on growing cotton basing on slavery.

Thus, the prosperity of this or that white farmer and planter depended on using slaves in his farm or plantation. Slaves working for planters took the lowest social positions as well as free slaves living in cities whose economic situation was also problematic. The white population of the South was divided into slave owners and yeoman farmers who had no slaves.

Thus, having no opportunities to use the advantages of slavery, yeoman farmers relied on their families’ powers, and they were poorer in comparison with planters (Picture 1). However, not all the planters were equally successful in their economic situation. Many planters owned only a few slaves, and they also had to work at their plantations or perform definite duties.

Slaves were also different in their status because of the functions performed. From this point, the social stratification was necessary not only for dividing the Southern population into black slaves and white owners but also to demonstrate the differences within these two main classes (Davidson et al.).

As a result, different social classes had various cultures. It is important to note that slaves were more common features in spite of their status in families, and they were united regarding the culture which was reflected in their religion, vision, and songs. The difference in the social status of the white population was more obvious, and the single common feature was the prejudice and discrimination against slaves.

Picture 1. Yeoman Farmer’s House

The Civil War became the real challenge for the USA because it changed all the structures and institutions of the country reforming the aspects of the political, economic, and social life. Furthermore, the Civil War brought significant losses and sufferings for both the representatives of the Northern and Southern armies.

It is important to note that the situation of the Union in the war was more advantageous in comparison with the position of the Confederacy during the prolonged period of the war actions.

As a result, the South suffered from more significant economic and social changes as well as from extreme losses in the war in comparison with the North’s costs. Thus, the main impact of the Civil War was the abolition of slavery which changed the economic and social structures of the South and contributed to shifting the focus on the role of federal government.

The Civil War resulted in abolishing slavery and preserving the political unity of the country. Nevertheless, these positive outcomes were achieved at the expense of significant losses in the number of population and in promoting more sufferings for ordinary people. A lot of the Confederacy’s soldiers died at the battlefields, suffering from extreme wounds and the lack of food because of the problems with weapon and food provision.

During the war, the Union focused on abolishing slaves who were proclaimed free. Thus, former slaves from the Southern states were inclined to find jobs in the North or join the Union army.

As a result, the army of the Confederacy also began to suffer from the lack of forces (Davidson et al.). Moreover, the situation was problematic off the battlefield because all the issues of food provision and work at plantations and farms challenged women living in the Southern states.

The forces of the Union army were more balanced, and their losses were less significant than in the Southern states. Furthermore, the end of the war did not change the structure of the social life in the North significantly. The impact of the war was more important for the Southerners who had to build their economic and social life without references to slavery.

The next important change was the alternations in the social role of women. Many women had to work at farms in the South and to perform as nurses in the North (Picture 2). The vision of the women’s role in the society was changed in a way.

However, in spite of the fact that the population of the South had to rebuild the social structure and adapt to the new social and economic realities, the whole economic situation was changed for better with references to intensifying the international trade. Furthermore, the abolishment of slavery was oriented to the social and democratic progress in the country.

Picture 2. “Our Women and the War”. Harper’s Weekly, 1862

Diversity is one of the main characteristic features of the American nation from the early periods of its formation. The American nation cannot be discussed as a stable one because the formation of the nation depends on the active migration processes intensifying the general diversity. As a result, the American nation is characterized by the richness of cultures, values, and lifestyles.

This richness is also typical for the early period of the American history when the country’s population was diverse in relation to ethnicity, cultures, religion, and social status. From this point, diversity directly shaped the American nation because the country’s population never was identical.

The Americans respected diversity if the question was associated with the problem of first migrations and the Americans’ difference from the English population. To win independence, it was necessary to admit the difference from the English people, but diversity was also the trigger for conflicts between the Americans, Englishmen, and Frenchmen as well as Indian tribes.

The ethic diversity was not respected by the first Americans. The further importations of slaves to America worsened the situation, and ethnic diversity increased, involving cultural and social diversity.

Diversity was respected only with references to the negative consequences of slave importation. Thus, the Southerners focused on using black slaves for development of their plantations (Davidson et al.). From this point, white planers concentrated on the difference of blacks and used it for discrimination.

Furthermore, slavery also provoked the cultural and lifestyle diversity between the South and the North of the country which resulted in the Civil War because of impossibility to share different values typical for the Southerners and Northerners. Moreover, the diversity in lifestyles of the Southerners was deeper because it depended on the fact of having or not slaves.

Great religious diversity was also typical for the nation. White population followed different branches of Christianity relating to their roots, and black people developed their own religious movements contributing to diversifying the religious life of the Americans (Davidson et al.).

Thus, the aspects of diversity are reflected in each sphere of the first Americans’ life with references to differences in ethnicities, followed religions, cultures, values, lifestyles, and social patterns. This diversity also provoked a lot of conflicts in the history of the nation.

The role of women in the American society changed depending on the most important political and social changes. The periods of reforms and transformations also promoted the changes in the social positions of women. The most notable changes are typical for the period of the Jacksonian era and for the Civil War period.

The changes in the role of women are closely connected with the development of women’s movements during the 1850s and with the focus on women’s powers off the battlefield during the Civil War period.

During the Jacksonian era, women began to play significant roles in the religious and social life of the country. Having rather limited rights, women could realize their potentials only in relation to families and church work. That is why, many women paid much attention to their church duties and responsibilities.

Later, the church work was expanded, and women began to organize special religious groups in order to contribute to reforming definite aspects of the Church’s progress. Women also were the main members of the prayer meetings, and much attention was drawn to the charity activities and assistance to hospitals (Davidson et al.).

Women also played the significant role in the development of revivalism as the characteristic feature of the period. Moreover, the active church work and the focus on forming organizations was the first step to the progress of the women’s rights movements.

It is important to note that the participation of women in the social life was rather limited during a long period of time that is why membership and belonging to different church organizations as well as development of women’s rights movements contributed to increasing the role of women within the society. Proclaiming the necessity of abolishment, socially active women also concentrated on the idea of suffrage which was achieved later.

The period of the 1850s is closely connected with the growth of the women’s rights movements because it was the period of stating to the democratic rights and freedoms within the society (Davidson et al.). The next important event is the Civil War. The war influenced the position of the Southern white and black women significantly, revealing their powers and ability to overcome a lot of challenges.

The end of the Civil War provided women with the opportunity to achieve all the proclaimed ideals of the women’s rights movements along with changing the position of male and female slaves in the American society.

The development of the American nation is based on pursuing certain ideals and following definite values. The main values which are greatly important for the Americans are associated with the notions which had the significant meaning during the periods of migration and creating the independent state. The two main values are opportunity and equality.

These values are also fixed in the Constitution of the country in order to emphasize their extreme meaning for the whole nation.

Opportunity and equality are the values which are shaped with references to the economic and social ideals because all the Americans are equal, and each American should have the opportunity to achieve the individual goal. Nevertheless, in spite of the proclaimed ideals, the above-mentioned values were discussed during a long period of time only with references to the white population of the country.

The other values typical for the Americans are also based not on the religious, moral or cultural ideals but on the social aspects. During the Jacksonian era, the Americans focused on such values as the democratic society. Following the ideals of rights and freedoms, the American population intended to realize them completely within the developed democratic society (Davidson et al.).

Moreover, these ideals were correlated with such values as equality and opportunity. It is necessary to pay attention to the fact that for many Americans the notions of democratic society, opportunity, and equality were directly connected with the economic growth. That is why, during long periods of time Americans concentrated on achieving freedoms along with pursuing the economic prosperity.

Thus, it is possible to determine such key values which regulate the social attitudes and inclinations of the Americans as equality and opportunity, freedoms and rights. In spite of the fact the USA was the country with the determined role of religion in the society, moral and religious aspects were not proclaimed as the basic values of the nation because of the prolonged focus of the Americans on their independence and prosperity.

From this point, opportunity, equality, freedoms, and rights are discussed as more significant values for the developed nation than the religious principles. The creation of the state independent from the influence of the British Empire resulted in determining the associated values and ideals which were pursued by the Americans during prolonged periods of the nation’s development.

The period of Reconstruction was oriented to adapting African Americans to the realities of the free social life and to rebuilding the economic structure of the South. The end of the Civil War guaranteed the abolishment of slavery, but the question of black people’s equality to the whites was rather controversial.

That is why, the period of Reconstruction was rather complex and had two opposite outcomes for the African Americans’ further life in the society and for the general economic progress of the states. Reconstruction was successful in providing such opportunities for African Americans as education and a choice to live in any region or to select the employer.

However, Reconstruction can also be discussed as a failure because the issues of racism were not overcome during the period, and the era of slavery was changed with the era of strict social segregation leading to significant discrimination of black people.

The positive changes in the life of African Americans after the Civil War were connected with receiving more opportunities for the social progress. Thus, many public schools were opened for the black population in order to increase the level of literacy (Picture 3). Furthermore, the impossibility to support the Southerners’ plantations without the free work of slaves led to changing the economic focus.

Thus, industrialization of the region could contribute to creating more workplaces for African Americans (Davidson et al.). Moreover, the racial and social equality should also be supported with references to providing more political rights for African Americans.

Reconstruction was the period of observing many black politicians at the American political arena. The question of blacks’ suffrage became one of the most discussed issues. From this point, during the period of Reconstruction African Americans did first steps on the path of equality.

Nevertheless, Reconstruction was also a great failure. The South remained unchanged in relation to the social relations between the whites and blacks. After the Civil War, segregation was intensified. The economic and social pressure as well as discrimination against the blacks was based on the developed concept of racism (Davidson et al.).

The Southerners preserved the prejudiced attitude toward the blacks, and prejudice and discrimination became the main challenge for African Americans in all the spheres of the life.

In spite of definite successes of Reconstruction, African Americans suffered from the results of segregation and discrimination, and they were prevented from changing their economic and social status.

Picture 3. Public Schools

Davidson, James, Brian DeLay, Christine Leigh Heyrman, Mark Lytle, and Michael Stoff. US: A Narrative History . USA: McGraw-Hill, 2008. Print.

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IvyPanda. (2023, December 31). Slavery and the Civil War. https://ivypanda.com/essays/slavery-and-the-civil-war/

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IvyPanda . 2023. "Slavery and the Civil War." December 31, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/slavery-and-the-civil-war/.

1. IvyPanda . "Slavery and the Civil War." December 31, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/slavery-and-the-civil-war/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Slavery and the Civil War." December 31, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/slavery-and-the-civil-war/.

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• The American Reconstruction: Failures and Significance
• American History: Reconstruction
• Slavery in the Southern Colonies
• American Reconstruction Period
• American History: Reconstruction, 1865 -1877
• The Los Angeles Zoot-Suit Riots and Its Effects
• History of American Foreign Policy
• Literary Works' Views on Slavery in the United States
• The Main Persons in Native American History
• "From Migrant to Acadian: A North American Border People, 1604–1755" by Naomi Griffiths

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The Civil War never ended

The questions that sent Americans to war with each other in the late 19th century still shape the country.

By Jill Filipovic

In Civil War , a new dystopian action film set in the near future,  “separatist” rebels in Texas and California band together against an authoritarian president, while brave journalists risk their lives to cover the conflict. Written and directed by Alex Garland, the movie taps into one of the most fascinating aspects of American culture: the collective obsession with our original civil war (1861-65) – and especially the fetishisation of it by the losers.

What Civil War , which will be released on 12 April, doesn’t aim to do is address the original civil war’s fault lines: north versus south in a battle over whether southern states could continue enslaving human beings. Nor does it interrogate how those lines continue to divide American politics: how race and racial animus influence voting and policy; how the Confederacy’s culture, political preferences and desire for minority rule remain at the heart of today’s Republican Party ; and how two divergent narratives of the Civil War undergird very different ideas of what America should be.

I was raised in the north-westernmost corner of the US in Washington, a state that during the Civil War was neither Union nor Confederate nor a state at all. What I learned about the Civil War growing up there was fairly straightforward: southern states wanted to continue the practice of chattel slavery, which was often discussed in terms of “the economy” (the southern economy being powered by forced, unpaid, lifelong labour) and “states’ rights” (to refuse to bow to federal authority, specifically any laws that sought to regulate or end slavery). When Abraham Lincoln, who opposed the expansion of slavery, was elected in 1860, southern leaders were irate, the South seceded and then the war began.

This is not what many schoolchildren in the American South learn. Some textbooks portray enslaved people as well treated and happy with their lives. The white southern narrative of the “lost cause” – which holds that the war was nobly fought over “freedom” and “states’ rights”, upon which the north was infringing, rather than over slavery – remains entrenched. (What exactly the southern states wanted to be free to do remains necessarily vague.) Confederate soldiers are still remembered as heroes. Southern Civil War memorials, many of them erected not in the postwar period but during the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s, pay homage to these pretexts. “That men of honour might forever know the responsibilities of freedom. Dedicated South Carolinians stood and were counted for their heritage and convictions,” one reads.

The pre-Civil War South was not a democracy, nor did it aspire to be. It was, and wanted to continue being, a harshly authoritarian state. Nationally, the right to vote was originally reserved for a minority – white male landowners – who were determined to preserve their tradition of white minority rule. Words such as “freedom” and “liberty” were bandied about, but in a sense that can only be described as “Orwellian”, meaning liberty for some, enabled by the blatant and violent subjugation of others.

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As Jamelle Bouie wrote in the New York Times Magazine in 2019, one of the men dedicated to upholding this system, John C Calhoun, vice president from 1825 to 1832, “was an astute politician, but he made his most important mark as a theoretician of reaction: a man who, realising that democracy could not protect slavery in perpetuity, set out to limit democracy”. Liberty, said Calhoun, was “a reward to be earned, not a blessing to be gratuitously lavished on all alike – a reward reserved for the intelligent, the patriotic, the virtuous and deserving… not a boon to be bestowed on a people too ignorant, degraded and vicious, to be capable… of enjoying it”. 

These ideas have never disappeared. They were the justification for Jim Crow, America’s racial apartheid system, and for voting rules that first formally prevented most Americans from voting, and later kept racial minorities and black Americans from their legal right to cast a ballot. You hear echoes of them now in conservative talking points about ending birthright citizenship, about unproven voter-fraud conspiracies, about undeserving welfare recipients, about a state’s right to force a woman to have a child, about how “real Americans” are having their birthrights stolen. The Republicans, once the party of Lincoln, experienced a national realignment in the 1960s with the passage of civil rights legislation, as racist, authoritarian whites fled the Democratic Party for the GOP.

The desire for minority rule is mainstream in today’s Republican Party, which has overturned voting rights legislation and made it more difficult for many to participate in democracy. The desire for authoritarianism has long been an undercurrent of conservative politics, but came to the fore in the Trump era. As Matthew C MacWilliams wrote in Politico in 2020, “The single factor that predicted whether a Republican primary voter supported Trump over his rivals was an inclination to authoritarianism.”

Authoritarianism or democracy? Majority rule with minority protections, or minority rule and majority marginalisation? These are the questions that have shaped US politics since the country’s inception. They are the questions that sent Americans to war with each other in the late 19th century. And they are the questions that still define American politics more sharply than ever in the age of Donald Trump – a man who routinely claims to hate losers, even as he takes up their lost cause.

[See also: Trump is not the problem ]

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This article appears in the 03 Apr 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Fragile Crown

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Home — Essay Samples — War — American Civil War — The Civil War in America

The Civil War in America

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Civil War History Shows the Danger of Comparing Trump to Jesus

D onald Trump has been in full Messiah-mode lately, telling his followers that he’s suffering for their sake , sharing a faux courtroom sketch  of Christ at his side, and circulating actor Jon Voight’s bizarre claim that he is being “destroyed as Jesus.”  

The last time America’s political scene witnessed such heavy Christ-comparisons was in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, when Unionists and Confederates both deified their heroes. This practice had ominous consequences, including the perpetuation of a violent white supremacist ideology in the South. This Easter it’s important to remember why analogies to Jesus should stay out of the political realm. The results are always ugly.

In the wake of Lincoln’s assassination on Good Friday, 1865, grieving Unionists, from politicians to faith leaders, began comparing the fallen president to Jesus. Within five hours of the shooting, James Garfield — who would become America’s second assassinated president 16 years later — told a Manhattan crowd : "It may be almost impious to say it, but it does seem that Lincoln's death parallels that of the Son of God." 

Ministers across America echoed the sentiment. “Heaven rejoices this Easter morning in the resurrection of our lost leader,” the Reverend Henry W. Bellows declared on Easter Sunday. In paintings, etchings, and cameos, Lincoln was depicted as the nation’s Savior .

Inevitably, this reverence produced a backlash in the South. Before the Civil War, Southerners were already enraged by Northern comparisons of the radical abolitionist John Brown to Jesus. In October of 1859, when Brown was awaiting execution, Henry David Thoreau delivered a speech in Concord , Mass., in which he declared that: “Some eighteen hundred years ago, Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung....He is not old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light.”

The apotheosis of an anti-slavery zealot like Brown was bad enough, but when Lincoln replaced him as the Christlike martyr, Confederates boiled over. Southern anger about Lincoln and the war he presided over was still too raw. One Kentucky editorialist denounced the late president as “head centre of a hot bed of thieves, knaves, cowards, plunderers, murderers, houseburners, woman murderers, spoon thieves.”

Read More: The Blasphemy of Comparing Trump to Jesus Christ

In 1866, Edward Pollard, the editor of the Richmond Examiner who launched the Lost Cause mythology—which glorified the Confederacy and its fight—bitterly attacked the North’s deification of “the Illinois Ape.” He opened chapter six of The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates, by lamenting that “A large portion of the Northern people have a custom of apotheosis.”

This characterization of apotheosis as a Northern phenomenon was a curious move, since Northerners and Southerners alike had spent 60 years deifying George Washington . But when Unionists combined Washington and Lincoln as " Father and Saviour of the Nation ," Pollard snapped. Idolatry, the editor claimed, was a Yankee sin, typical of a people whose fanatical Puritan ancestors had revered their leaders as “saints.” To Pollard, the “contrast between the Northern and Southern minds” was evident in their different approach to “worship of that great American idol—the Union.” Throughout his book, Pollard condemned what he saw as excessive worship of the Constitution, the Union, Brown, Ulysses S. Grant, and above all—Lincoln. Southerners, he insisted, were more measured in their enthusiasms.

In the coming years the South proved him wrong.

With Northerners and their allies embracing Lincoln as the Union’s savior, Southerners searched for their own messiah. First they honored the incarcerated Confederate President Jefferson Davis as a martyr. During his postwar imprisonment in Fortress Monroe, Davis’ wife, Varina, wove her husband a crown of thorns , while Southern ministers referred to his chains as “the martyr ring.”

Some Southern ministers went so far as to encourage all Confederate veterans to compare themselves to Christ. In Baptized in Blood , historian Charles Reagan Wilson chronicles how “Carter Helm Jones of Louisville reminded his audience of war veterans of ‘the memories of your Gethsemane’ and ‘the agonies of your Golgotha.’”

Robert E. Lee, however, got the fullest Jesus-treatment. After his death in 1870, Lee’s fans were quick to make the comparison. Joseph B. Kershaw, a Confederate general from South Carolina, wrote a commemoration  reprinted in multiple Southern papers in which he praised Lee’s form, face and bearing as “god-like in beauty, power and grace,” before asking: “what was his life for the last five years but a constant martyrdom of the spirit—daily dying for us.”

Virginia state senator John Daniel, a rising political star, picked up the ball at the 1883 dedication of the Recumbent Lee  monument at Washington and Lee University. Daniel delivered a three-hour speech in which he compared Lee’s tormented decision over whether to join the Confederacy, and his subsequent years of fighting, to “the agony of and bloody sweat of Gethsemane and to the Cross of Calvary beyond.”  

This comparison persisted for decades . In 1904, a writer in the Charlotte Observer mused “Since the Christ-man walked the waters of blue Galilee, no man has been as nearly his counterpart as this hero of our Southland, Robert E. Lee.” And in 1917, the Reverend Randolph McKim wrote that Lee’s sufferings had “pressed sorely upon him, a true crown of thorns.”

The sense of Lee as a Southern Jesus is one reason why the landscape south of the Mason-Dixon line is still filled with Lee memorials. Southerners erected Confederate monuments in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to enforce racial hierarchies, but in Lee’s case they also provided a counterpoint to Lincoln idolatry. North and South, each culture dedicated hundreds of memorials to its favorite demigod.

In 1922, when Lincoln was "enshrined" in his enormous "temple" on the National Mall , the United Daughters of the Confederacy tried to counter with a huge carving of Lee at Stone Mountain, Ga., unveiled two years later. Their effort floundered when the sculptor of the Lee carving, Gutzon Borglum, feuded with the UDC over finances and personality clashes and left to carve presidents, including Lincoln, at Mount Rushmore. Borglum’s Lee was later blasted off the mountain, making way for Henry Augustus Lukeman’s sculpture of Lee, Davis, and Stonewall Jackson.

Read More: Tim Alberta on What Fuels the Evangelical Devotion to Trump

In 1924, at the unveiling ceremony for Borglum’s short-lived Lee, Plato Durham—former dean at Emory University—gave an address in which he, too, deified the general. This time Lee was described not as the Son of God, but as a Roman sun god: “Oh Mountain, speak your message well…When the rain of heaven beats upon your majestic face, let all men say ‘Lee is weeping for the sorrows of a people.’ When the sun of morning strikes along your altitudes, let mankind behold a newer Sol Invictus and exclaim ‘The Invincible Light.’”

The deification of Lee had deadly consequences. Memorials to the general depicted him in uniform, exalting the Confederate cause and its faith in white supremacy—what W.E.B. Du Bois called “the religion of whiteness.” By honoring Lee as a martyr to a noble cause, Southerners could resist looking inward and reconsidering the truth about slavery and the Civil War. Instead, with Lee as their idol, Southern believers in whiteness unleashed a century of violence: from the white knights of the Ku Klux Klan, burning crosses and murdering Black Americans, to the white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va. in 2017, who came to rally round a statue of Lee, wielding torches and running down pedestrians. 

Donald Trump responded to the violence in Charlottesville by saying that there were “very fine people” on both sides. And now that he is the Christlike martyr—whose faithful followers proved willing, on Jan. 6, 2021, to storm the Capitol, attack police officers, and threaten to hang then-vice president Mike Pence—Americans are left to wonder what further violence might emerge from such twisted faith.

Laura Brodie teaches at Washington and Lee University. She is author of numerous books, including. Breaking Out: VMI and the Coming of Women .

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here . Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors .

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How Civil War's Siege Sequence Used Football Plays To Make War Combat More Realistic

• Football plays became integral in directing Civil War 's climactic siege scene for clear movement illustration.
• Alex Garland collaborated with a former Navy SEAL to create a realistic action sequence in the upcoming film.
• Civil War trailers spark intrigue with unique allies and unsettling concepts that already earning high praise from early reviews.

Civil War director Alex Garland gives insight into his creative process and details how football plays were useful when planning his latest movie. The upcoming action-thriller follows a group of journalists as they traverse through a fictional second Civil War set in the near future. The film stars Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, Nick Offerman, Jesse Plemons, and Stephen McKinley Henderson.

In an interview with Screen Rant , filmmaker Alex Garland detailed how football plays became integral when planning the film’s climactic siege sequence. The director said his use of football plays was necessary to properly illustrate the flow of movement in an action scene to his cast and crew. He asked collaborator Raymond Dose , a former Navy SEAL, to assist him in this maneuver. Garland and Dose were able to achieve a sequence that should be both captivating and realistic. Read Garland’s full quote below:

I'm glad you mentioned his name. I'm about to work with him again, and he is a really important part of this film. I also like and respect him very much, and we are hoping to work together again shortly. The football play thing is something I do anyway. Storyboards are great; they work very well for certain kinds of films. In something like this, and in general when I'm doing action, what I want the actors and crew and all of us to understand is the flow of movement. Actually, football plays explain that more clearly than storyboards do. You look at a top-down view and you can see an arrow in these little circles, which are the people are moving through here and around. It's a of suspending the thing in a clear way in everybody's mind. What I said to Ray in the sequence that you are referring to was, "How would a group of SEALs move from this position to that position? How would they get there?" They've got people shooting at them trying to stop them. That was the only input I had into that. He brought in some colleagues he served with, and they did their thing. And then what we did was function. I said, "Don't worry about the camera, don't even think about the camera. Don't even think about the actors playing journalists. The journalists will then do what they're supposed to do, which is record what you guys are doing. And then, as the crew, we will record the journalists recording you guys." And so what we had in the end was something in some ways like a controlled, contrived documentary sequence that then we could shoot. There's dialogue and actions that were never in the script; never intended. That's just Ray and his colleagues working together to do their thing, and then we are recording it.

How Civil War Is Shaping Up To Be Garland’s Most Important Film So Far

Civil war is being deemed a warning of the current political climate..

The Civil War trailers also left questions about Texas and California's unusual pairing as allies , further leaving intrigue about the movie's events.

Civil War has earned its first wave of reviews and is currently ranked the highest of all the films Garland’s directed so far. At the time of this writing, Civil War has a 93% on review-aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes with 40 reviews. This suggests the movie should top out at the low nineties or high eighties. According to Rotten Tomatoes, the upcoming film is being applauded for its unsettling concept and gripping handling of its violent, captivating themes.

With the rest of his filmography as proof, Garland is no stranger to violent imagery alongside themes full of complexity and depth, with Civil War as no exception. In particular, its dystopian premise has led to many discussions about its implications for the real world, almost as a forewarning in light of the current political climate. The Civil War trailers also left questions about Texas and California's unusual pairing as allies , further leaving intrigue about the movie's events.

After insinuating in an interview with The Guardian , the movie became even more significant as it could have been spelled as the final directorial movie under Garland's belt. However, that comment has since been clarified that the director is simply taking " a break from directing for the foreseeable future ."

All 3 Alex Garland Films Ranked From Worst To Best

With the A24 movie being one of the most ambitious, it's no surprise that the director took the time to focus on the technical aspects to give it the realistic nature of the dire event. The approach will seemingly pay off in theaters when audiences see the anticipated siege sequence. When combined with the subject matter being dangerously close to the U.S.’s political strife, Civil War is shaping up to be a disturbing moviegoing experience that sticks with the viewer.

Civil War is a 2024 action thriller from writer and director Alex Garland. Starring Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, and Stephen McKinley Henderson, Civil War takes place in the near future and shows the United States entering a new Civil War after California and Texas attempt to separate from the country.

Director Alex Garland

Release Date April 12, 2024

Studio(s) DNA Films

Distributor(s) A24

Writers Alex Garland

Cast Cailee Spaeny, Wagner Moura, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Nick Offerman, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons

Runtime 109 Minutes

Genres Drama, Action

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Why california and texas are allies in ‘civil war’.

Filmmaker Alex Garland explained that the states are united to bring down a fascist president: "If you cannot conceive of that, what you're saying is that your polarized political position would be more important."

By Kirsten Chuba

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Civil War , the buzzy A24 film that follows a team of journalists as they race to Washington, D.C., to document American citizens fighting each other across the country and rebel forces descending on the White House, throws in one surprise right off the bat: California and Texas, typically political opposites, are allies in the war.

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“Then it’s saying that two states that have a different political position have said, ‘Our political difference is less important than this,'” Garland continued. “And then the counter to that is if you cannot conceive of that, what you’re saying is that your polarized political position would be more important than a fascist president. Which, when you put it like that, I would suggest, is insane. That’s an insane position to hold. So it’s sort of an oblique commentary and I think that’s how the film works in general. It’s not explaining this stuff but it’s also not avoiding this stuff.”

Director Alex Garland shares his reasoning for paring up California and Texas in #CivilWar at the premiere of the film pic.twitter.com/4SFfDrHKtq — The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) April 3, 2024

Offerman added that the two states working together — who in the film have formed the Western Forces — “serves a few purposes but one of them is to immediately say, ‘This is not supposed to represent the world as it is.’ But I think it also serves to say the way the world is working these days, anything is possible and so quickly.”

Garland first wrote the story in 2020, and said releasing it now — roughly six months before the major 2024 election — “is really strange, just the sense of déjà vu.”

Kirsten Dunst , Wagner Moura, Stephen McKinley Henderson and Cailee Spaeny star in the project as war journalists, and downplay any concerns that the film may incite any kind of real-life violence or political reaction.

Kirsten Dunst says she's not worried about #CivilWar causing any violence in the real-world pic.twitter.com/EqdRiC3u3A — The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) April 3, 2024

“It’s a movie and it’s meant to start conversations and I think it really lets the audience decide what they want to put onto it,” Dunst said. “It’s not partisan in any way, I think it’s actually more of an anti-war film if anything.”

Moura added that he hopes there isn’t any violence “because this is exactly what the film is not about. The film doesn’t have a political agenda, you really cannot say that this is a liberal film, a conservative film, it’s a film that says that polarization — I won’t say would lead to any civil war — but can lead to social conflict and it’s a problem for democracies.”

Offerman also weighed in, noting that after all the online chatter ahead of its release, “when you see the movie you’re like, ‘Oh shit, it’s actually just super-intelligent and a kickass movie that none of us can legitimately get mad about because it’s just a beautiful piece of art.'” He additionally noted that any comparisons to his character and Donald Trump while shooting “didn’t even come up. It’s so unrelated to any actual factions or politicians,” and commended Garland for not including real-life political points in the story.

Nick Offerman says there were zero discussions about Donald Trump during the making of #CivilWar pic.twitter.com/A97I8jgeiE — The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) April 3, 2024

Moura said he’s taken that into his own life as well, and after wrapping the film, “I really started to reach out to people who think differently politically and listen to them, because if you believe in democracy — if you’re not some crazy racist, homophobic, kind of crazy thing — I’m really willing to listen to you and I was very surprised to see that there’s a lot of common ground. If our differences are only like how the state deals with things, we should definitely listen to each other and talk to each other and avoid this hate.”

At the premiere, Wagner Moura says working on #CivilWar inspired him to talk to people who don't share his political views pic.twitter.com/B6Xc4rs0XE — The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) April 3, 2024

Civil War hits theaters April 12.

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Screen Rant

Civil war movie map reveals which states are in alliance (besides texas & california).

A map of Alex Garland's Civil War movie reveals which states in the US are in an alliance, aside from Texas and California forming the Western Forces.

• A new poster for Alex Garland's Civil War movie reveals alliances beyond the one between California and Texas.
• The map displays the Florida Alliance in the southeast and the New People's Army in the northwest.
• Remaining states are deemed "Loyalist States," aligned with the oppressive federal government.

A new poster for Alex Garland's Civil War reveals which states are in an alliance, aside from the Western Forces made up of California and Texas. The dystopian film follows a group of journalists traveling the war-torn United States during a future Second Civil War, documenting the struggles of survival and wartime among the fighting populations. This includes looking at the dictatorship the US has become and the factions involved in warring for or against it.

Now, A24 has released a new poster for the upcoming Civil War movie , showcasing a detailed map of which states are in an alliance.

The map shows California and Texas are part of the Western Forces, which was previously teased in trailers for the movie. This new map reveals the southeast corner of the US has formed the Florida Alliance , while the northwest corner is the New People's Army. Every other state is labeled as "Loyalist States," indicating their allegiance to the tyrannical federal government.

What Civil War's Different US Factions Mean

The united states is more divided than ever before.

The many different factions in Civil War showcase just how divided the United States is in the war-torn future Garland has created. The Loyalist States appear to be those that are aligned with the federal government, while every other faction is seemingly against what the US has become. However, since these three other separatist groups don't seem to be allied with each other, they all may want to instill leadership over the US in their own way.

Since positive reviews for Civil War praise its themes and the questions its story posits, the movie no doubt delves deep into why the US is divided into so many different sides. The Western Forces appear to be the most unique case, with California and Texas separated from one another by Loyalist States. While the movie is going to take place in the midst of the war, it will likely also focus on the US' alternate history, explaining how both states ended up becoming allies.

A24's Civil War Rotten Tomatoes Score Is A Big Relief After This Movie From 2 Years Ago

With this new map of the movie offering more context to how the US is split up, it makes for the perfect companion to Civil War to understand what to expect in the film. It's possible a similar map will be shown in the movie as well, fully illustrating how the country is divided as it explores what this means for its dystopian future. Since the movie will be arriving in theaters later this month, it won't be long until answers surrounding the new makeup of the United States are provided.

Why Civil War's Multiple US Factions Helps Make The Movie Better

Multiple factions showcase people's complicated political viewpoints.

While the cause of Civil War 's conflict remains unclear, it appears to be influenced by Nick Offerman's President character seizing control of the nation in a tyrannical way. The resulting factions that spawn because of this decision may want to instill their own forms of government when ousting him. While one of the factions may want to return to a democratic republic, it's just as possible they all have their own ideas as to how the country should evolve going forward. This could include more democratic ideals, or similar authoritarianism to the President.

By having multiple factions be part of the movie, Civil War can capture the multifaceted ways in which Americans are now divided. It's possible the movie will also utilize its commentary as a way to reflect modern day politics and the strong divisions they cause. Since the film will be from the perspective of journalists, it might present the US factions in an objective light. However, the beliefs of the characters will no doubt also form important distinctions surrounding how war has impacted everyone.

Will Civil War End With One Side Winning?

The many sides of the movie make its outcome unclear.

While excitement for Civil War may stem from learning about what each faction in the movie believes, there's also the possibility that the movie will showcase which side of the war will win. This could make for an interesting commentary on American politics depending on which of the many factions winds up in control of the country by the end. However, if one side were to win, Garland's movie could be accused of favoring a specific political ideology. This makes it far more likely the film will be a snapshot of a divided, dystopian future than about one side triumphing.

It's also possible the movie ends with no side winning , instead destroying one another - and thus the entire country - in a massive convergence of ideology. This divided version of America could be doomed to destroy itself, a potent commentary on how division and strife ultimately lead to chaos and destruction for everyone involved. No matter how Civil War plays out, though, the movie will clearly demonstrate why the US is divided into so many sides - and what war means for its dystopian future.

Civil War arrives in theaters on April 12.

Source: A24 /Twitter

Civil War is a 2024 action thriller from writer and director Alex Garland. Starring Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, and Stephen McKinley Henderson, Civil War takes place in the near future and shows the United States entering a new Civil War after California and Texas attempt to separate from the country.

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What We Know About the Iranian Commanders Killed by Israel in Syria

The leaders included Gen. Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the senior most leader in Iran’s armed forces assassinated since Qassim Suleimani was killed in 2020.

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By Farnaz Fassihi

Iran’s supreme leader on Tuesday pledged to avenge the deaths of three commanders and four officers in Iran’s armed forces, one day after they were killed in a precision Israeli airstrike on the Iranian embassy compound in Damascus.

The leaders, Iranian officials said, were some of the highest ranking leaders in the Quds Force, overseeing Iran’s covert intelligence and military operations in Syria and Lebanon. The strike was the deadliest against Iranian officials in recent memory and has shaken the country’s armed forces establishment.

The strike, both the latest in a yearslong shadow war between Iran and Israel and a seeming escalation in that conflict, has again brought attention to Israel and Iran’s conflicting ambitions in the region and the network of proxies Iran employs to fight its battles.

“We will make them regret this crime and similar crimes, with the help of God,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, said of the Israelis.

Here’s what we know about the commanders who were killed.

How important were the slain Quds Force commanders?

Among the officers killed on Monday was Gen. Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a veteran of the Revolutionary Guards Corps and its external branch the Quds Forces. General Zahedi, three Iranian officials and a Guard member said, was the corps’ top commander in the region, in charge of Iran’s network of proxy militias, particularly those in Lebanon and Syria.

The general, the senior most commander to be killed since the U.S. assassination of Qassim Suleimani in 2020, coordinated the Iranian-backed armed groups and selected targets in their attacks on U.S. and Israeli interests in the region.

His death, analysts said, was a significant blow to Iran’s military operations in the Middle East.

A member of the Guards who knew General Zahedi, but requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the Iranian leadership was “in shock” over his assassination and viewed avenging his death as their moral duty. Iranian state media published multiple photos of General Zahedi over the years with senior Iranian military and political officials.

Among those prominent personages are Mr. Khamenei himself, with whom the general served as a young revolutionary in the 1970s and as a comrade in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. Owing to multiple tours in Lebanon, the general also had a relationship with Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shiite militia in that country.

As commander of the Quds Forces in Lebanon and Syria from 2008 to 2014, he controlled the Iranian forces deployed to help President Bashar Assad of Syria remain in power at the height of that country’s civil war, according to the general’s official biography.

General Zahedi was killed with two other Quds Force generals: Gen. Hossein Aminollahi and Gen. Mohammad Hadi Haj Rahimi, General Zahedi’s deputy. Both men were also veterans of wars in the Middle East, according to Iranian media reports. Four other officers of the Quds Forces were also killed.

How much of a blow is it for the Quds Force to lose these commanders?

In the past, Iran has mostly managed to navigate the killing of its senior commanders by Israel and the United States without much impact to its operations.

But the scope and timing of Monday’s deadly strike present a new challenge for the Islamic Republic.

The killings come at a time of war in Gaza, which Iran has tried to spread and intensify across several fronts through the involvement of its proxy militias, known as the axis of resistance. Those proxies have opened fronts in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and the Red Sea from which to attack Israel and Israeli interests. Iran also provides financial, tactical and military support to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the two main Palestinian armed groups fighting Israel in Gaza.

Losing General Zahedi, Iran’s top field commander, and his deputy, instantly wipes out years of military expertise and personal connections that are often key to successful operations in the Middle East, analysts said.

At the very least, Iran will suffer a short term tactical blow until it can regroup. Depending on how quickly Iran can deploy a comparable replacement for General Zahedi, analysts said, its forces and proxies could be vulnerable.

“This is the Israeli version of the U.S. strike on Qassim Suleimani,” said Dana Stroul, formerly the Pentagon’s top Middle East policy official who is now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Not only did the strike impose costs directly on I.R.G.C. leadership, but by taking out individuals responsible for covert operations abroad, it will deal a significant blow to Iran’s proxy network.”

But over the longer term, the effect of losing these commanders is likely to be more manageable.

“From a tactical and short-term standpoint, their absence will be felt,” said Sina Azodi, an expert on Iran’s military and a lecturer at George Washington University. “But from a strategic standpoint, it will not impact Iran’s operations in the region or significantly reduce its influence.”

How might Iran retaliate?

Analysts said that Iran is keen to respond in a way that deters Israel from future assassinations. It has several options for retaliating, but the stakes in each case are high.

Iran could launch long-range ballistic missiles into Israel directly from its own soil, as it did on an American military base in Iraq in retaliation for General Suleimani’s death in 2020. That approach, however, risks starting an all-out war with Israel and potentially dragging in the United States, a scenario Iran has largely avoided since the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7.

Iran could also respond through its proxies, particularly Hezbollah, which could escalate attacks along Israel’s border with Lebanon. Iran could also order attacks from proxies in Syria and Iraq on American military bases as a way to pressure the Biden administration to rein in Israel.

What are the political calculations inside Iran?

There are divisions within Iran’s decision making circles, including at the Supreme National Security Council and within the Guards, on how Iran should respond, according to three Iranians familiar with the deliberations.

The council said it had convened an emergency meeting on Monday night attended by Iran’s president to discuss the attack and had reached “an appropriate decision,” without elaborating on the details.

At the meeting, some hard-line members argued that Iran should strike targets inside Israel with missiles. Anything short of a direct reply, they argued, would show weakness. But other more moderate members pushed back, saying that Israel was goading Iran into war and Iran should continue its policy of “strategic patience” and retaliation through its proxy militias, according to the three Iranians, two of them members of the Guards.

Ultimately, Mr. Khamenei has the last word about how to respond and, they said, his position will become more clear in the coming days and weeks.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.

Farnaz Fassihi is a reporter for The New York Times based in New York. Previously she was a senior writer and war correspondent for the Wall Street Journal for 17 years based in the Middle East. More about Farnaz Fassihi

• International

Israel-Hamas war

Solar eclipse

April 1, 2024 - Israel-Hamas war

By Jessie Yeung , Antoinette Radford, Maureen Chowdhury , Elise Hammond and Aditi Sangal , CNN

Our live coverage of Israel's war on Hamas in Gaza has moved  here .

Japan lifts funding suspension of UN Palestinian relief agency

From CNN's Moeri Karasawa

Japan has lifted its funding suspension of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees , Minister for Foreign Affairs Yoko Kamikawa said Tuesday.

Israel has  accused at least 12 staffers  from the UN Relief and Works Agency of being involved in the October 7 Hamas attacks and has alleged that about 12% of the UN Relief and Works Agency's 13,000 staffers are members of Hamas or other Palestinian militant groups. UNRWA says it has fired 10 of the 12 accused staffers and that the other two are dead. CNN cannot confirm the allegations.

Japan's move came after a meeting on Saturday between Kamikawa and Philippe Lazzarini, Commissioner General of UNRWA.

In the meeting, Lazzarini laid out the steps the agency was taking to “improve screening and education to ensure neutrality of UNRWA staff,” according to a  statement  from Japan's foreign ministry on Saturday.

UNRWA also agreed to establish a new framework with Japan on project management and monitoring to ensure “transparency and traceability of projects,” the ministry added.

Some background: UNRWA is the primary humanitarian aid group in Gaz a.  Some 2 million Gazans rely  on the agency for aid, with 1 million people using UNRWA shelters for food and healthcare amid the fighting in the enclave.

Australian among aid workers killed in Gaza, Australia's prime minister says

From CNN's Hilary Whiteman and Irene Nasser

An Australian is among members of the aid organization World Central Kitchen who were killed in Gaza , Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Tuesday.

"Lalzawmi 'Zomi' Frankcom was doing extraordinarily valuable work. This is someone who volunteered in Australia to help people during the bushfires. This is someone who was volunteering overseas to provide aid through this charity for people who are suffering tremendous deprivation in Gaza," Albanese said. "Australia expects full accountability for the deaths of aid workers, which is completely unacceptable," Albanese said. 

Australia has contacted Israel, Albanese said, adding that the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has "requested a call-in from the Israeli ambassador to Australia" to "ask for accountability."

"The truth is that this is beyond beyond any reasonable circumstances that someone going about providing aid and humanitarian assistance should lose their life. And there were four aid workers as well as a Palestinian driver in this vehicle," Albanese said.

The prime minister sent his deepest condolences to her family.

Iran's foreign minister says Israel carried out consulate attack, but that the US is responsible

From CNN's Hamdi Alkhshali

Iran's Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian has blamed Israel for Monday's attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria, but also said that the United States was responsible for it because it supports Israel.

The top diplomat's comments underscore the increasing strain between Tehran and Washington, with Iran pointing fingers at the US for its support of Israel.

Conveying the stern message in a post on  X , Amir-Abdollahian said the Swiss chargé d'affaires in Tehran was summoned by Iran's Foreign Ministry early Tuesday to discuss the incident, given Switzerland's role in representing US interests in Iran.

“The dimensions of the Israeli regime’s terrorist attack and crime were explained, and the American administration’s responsibility underlined" in the meeting, the minister said. “An important message was relayed to the American administration as the Zionist regime’s supporter,” he added. “The United States should be answerable.”

Some background: The Israel Defense Forces hasn't commented publicly on the strike that Iran said killed two commanders and several others. But IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari  disputed that the building was a consulate . "This is a military building of Quds forces disguised as a civilian building in Damascus," he said. Separately, The New York Times reported that four unnamed Israeli officials acknowledged that Israel carried out the attack.

5 people working with World Central Kitchen non-profit killed in Gaza, José Andrés says

From CNN’s Abeer Salman, Caitlin Hu, Muhammad Darwish, and Eyad Kourdi

At least five people working with the World Central Kitchen (WCK) have been killed in Gaza, WCK founder José Andrés told CNN on Monday, without giving specific details.

"We are aware of reports that members of the World Central Kitchen team have been killed in an IDF attack while working to support our humanitarian food delivery efforts in Gaza. This is a tragedy. Humanitarian aid workers and civilians should NEVER be a target. EVER. We will share more information when we have gathered all the facts,” WCK said in a separate statement.

Videos obtained by CNN show the bodies of multiple people wearing apparent WCK vests after an airstrike hit Deir Al-Balah in central Gaza.

The Israel Defense Forces said it is "conducting a thorough review at the highest levels to understand the circumstances of this tragic incident."

Among the deceased were found a British passport, a Polish passport, and an Australian passport.

CNN has reached out to the various foreign ministries – but has not yet received a response.

White House is set to approve largest foreign military sale to Israel since October 7. Here's the latest

From CNN staff

Iran is accusing Israel of killing two senior commanders in a strike on its consulate in Damascus, Syria. Tehran promised a "decisive" response to the strike. The attack may be the most dangerous escalation outside of Gaza since the start of the Hamas-Israel war nearly six months ago.

The New York Times reported that four unnamed Israeli officials acknowledged that Israel carried out the attack. CNN cannot verify the report and has reached out to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for comment.

The military hasn't commented publicly on the strike, but IDF spokesperson, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, disputed that the building was a consulate . "According to our intelligence, this is no consulate and this is no embassy," he said. "This is a military building of Quds forces disguised as a civilian building in Damascus."

The Quds Force is a unit of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps responsible for foreign operations.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration is close to approving the sale of as many as  50 American-made F-15 fighter jets to Israel , in a deal expected to be worth more than $18 billion, according to three people familiar with the matter. The transaction would amount to the largest US foreign military sale to Israel since the country went to  war  with Hamas on October 7.

Here's what else to know:

Israel's treatment of detainees: The Israel Defense Forces told CNN on Monday that those detained in Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza during a 14-day operation are being "treated in accordance with international law ." Al-Shifa medical workers have said that staff were forced to strip naked, and that one staff representative was left "half naked for three hours" before being allowed to talk.

Ambulances face hurdles in reaching Al-Shifa: Ambulances trying to reach Al-Shifa following the withdrawal of Israeli troops are finding it " almost impossible because of the damaged roads," Gaza's Civil Defense tells CNN. "Right now, we are putting out fires, retrieving bodies of martyrs and moving the injured. But unfortunately, the ambulances can’t reach the hospital because of the problems on the road," Director of Operations Raed al-Dahshan told CNN.

The UN will also try to reach Al-Shifa: The United Nations is planning a mission to Al-Shifa Hospital as soon as it is "allowed to help people receive medical attention and to assess the facility," the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said Monday.

Hamas leader's sister arrested in Israel: Sabah Abdel Salam Haniyeh, the sister of the head of Hamas’s political bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, has been arrested in Israel on suspicion of terror offenses. She is accused of “having contact with Hamas operatives” and “inciting and supporting acts of terrorism in Israel,” according to Israeli police.

US pushed for alternatives to Rafah ground offensive: Senior US and Israeli officials met virtually to discuss  potential military operations in Rafah  on Monday. The White House said there was no breakthrough, but that conversations will continue over the coming weeks.

In other news:

• US and Jordanian forces conducted joint humanitarian airdrops of food into northern Gaza, according to US Central Command.
• France is circulating a new draft resolution at the United Nations that calls for an immediate ceasefire and the release of all Israeli hostages.

This post has been updated with the New York Times report about the Damascus attack.

Here's what Gaza's Al-Shifa Hospital looked like before it was devastated during Israel's siege

From CNN's photo team

A journalist working for CNN said the scene at Gaza City's Al-Shifa Hospital on Monday “feels like a horror movie" after Israeli forces withdrew, ending their two-week siege of the facility.

Here's what the hospital complex looked like a few months ago:

Here's what it looked like today:

US has not yet seen operational plans from Israel on Rafah strategy, US official says

From CNN's MJ Lee

The Biden administration has yet to see operational plans from the Israeli government detailing what a major military operation into Rafah would look like, including how Israel would try to protect the more than 1 million civilians in that area, US officials tells CNN on the heels of a virtual meeting of senior American and Israeli officials Monday.

Senior US officials have been steadfast in their public warnings in recent weeks that Israel must not expand its military operations into southern Gaza without an executable plan to protect the many civilians who are currently sheltering in Rafah .

The fact that the US has yet to be presented with a detailed blueprint on how Israel would conduct such an operation makes it clear that if Israeli forces were to move forward with a ground incursion into Rafah at this time, Israel would be crossing the so-called “red line” that President Joe Biden warned about recently.

CNN previously reported that in Monday’s meeting, the two delegations discussed the situation in Rafah and that US officials presented to their Israeli counterparts alternatives to a major ground operation into southern Gaza.

Russia denounces attack on Iranian consulate in Damascus. Here are the latest reactions

From CNN’s Mariya Knight, Eyad Kourdi and Hamdi Alkhshali

The Russian Foreign Ministry “strongly condemned” the attack on the Iranian consulate building in Damascus in a statement published on its website Monday.

“We consider any attacks on diplomatic and consular facilities to be categorically unacceptable, the inviolability of which is guaranteed by the relevant Vienna Conventions,” the ministry said, adding that “such aggressive actions by Israel are absolutely unacceptable and must be stopped.”

Iran has blamed Israel for Monday's attack. When asked if Israel was involved, Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman Daniel Hagari told CNN's Jim Sciutto that Israel won’t comment on the attack but believes the Iranian building that was struck is a "military building of Quds forces," with his a unit of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

CNN cannot independently verify the claims from either country.

In other reactions:

• Hamas denounced the strike and blamed Israel, labeling the assault as a "blatant violation of international law" and an "infringement on the sovereignty of both Syria and Iran."
• Oman' s foreign ministry expressed its “strong condemnation and denouncement” in a statement.
• Hezbollah , the Lebanese group backed by Iran, blamed Israel for the strike and warned it would face "punishment and revenge."
• Saudi Arabia 's foreign ministry condemned the attack and rejected the targeting of diplomatic facilities under any pretext, citing a violation of international diplomatic laws.

This post has been updated with Hezbollah and Saudi Arabia's responses.

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